Duncan Hewitt reports on why Chinese are dissing their own soccer team:
The world might be quaking at China’s ever growing medals tally, but you wouldn’t have known it from recent front-page headlines in Chinese newspapers. “Please forget about these Olympics”, implored Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post. “Shameful failure”, proclaimed the city’s Youth Daily. The cause of such despair? The pointing finger of Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho on the Youth Daily cover made it clear: the Chinese men’s soccer team had lost again, 3-0 to Brazil in their final group game, thus ending their hopes of qualifying for the Olympic quarter-finals.
Not that losing to the world’s most powerful soccer-playing nation—aided by a genuine, if somewhat out-of-form, superstar in Ronaldinho—is necessarily a matter for shame. But Chinese fans on the internet were quick to suggest that the Brazilians had only played to 50% of their capacity, in part because they were concerned about not getting injured. This points to the real source of the anger expressed by the Chinese press: China’s match against Belgium last Sunday—when it not only lost 2:0, but had two players sent off for crude and in one case dangerous challenges. The fact that one of them was Zheng Zhi—captain of the senior Chinese soccer team and a professional with Charlton Athletic in England, who had been drafted in to add experience and maturity—only added to the disappointment.
Internet commentary lit up with denunciations. A posting that accused Zheng Zhi of killing Chinese soccer quickly got three hundred thousand hits. One of China’s most famous sports writers announced he would never write about Chinese soccer again. Reaction to the Brazil-China result was predictably angry: "Please disband this team and don't waste the Chinese people's money on it any further" was a typical post on Sina.com. Sports website Titan headlined the mock slogan: "Cherish Life, Stay Away from Chinese Football"; one of the options in its multiple-choice survey of reader’s suggestions following the defeat used a derisive pun on the Chinese word for "soccer": "national pigs, commit collective suicide!".
The web was soon resounding with sarcastic new lyrics to the Olympic song "Beijing Welcomes You": “the Chinese football team welcomes you… our goal is always open, don’t be polite;… if you don’t score many today, we’ll let you make up for it next time.”
Mainstream media were hardly more polite: “Responsibility lies with the management of Chinese football, its obsession with short-term profit, its incompetence and its sloth”, said a commentary from no less an institution than the official Xinhua News Agency. The Youth Daily put it more succinctly: “The finger [of blame] points at the Chinese Football Association”, it proclaimed.
Such vitriol underscored the fact that coverage of soccer is one area of the Chinese media which is relatively uncontrolled. This may be partly because the topic is sport and therefore in theory less politically sensitive. But it’s probably also because authorities know that public anger about the nation’s football team is so great that suppressing it could be dangerous. Starting in the 80s there have been several riots after national team defeats; failure to qualify for the 1998 World Cup finals after losing to tiny Gulf State Qatar led to a shirtless protest by hundreds of fans in sub-zero temperature outside CFA headquarters.
Qualification for the 2002 World Cup finals, aided by the absence of hosts Japan and South Korea from the Asian qualifying rounds, turned out to be a false dawn, as the team lost all its games. Since then the authorities have hired a Chinese coach, a Dutch coach, another Chinese coach, a Serbian coach—with the failure to qualify for the 2010 World Cup after a recent defeat to Iraq the latest in a string of ignominious results. Corruption in the Chinese soccer league has hardly helped. Criticizing the players and the CFA has become something of a national pastime.
The Olympics was supposed to be the moment when it all came right. The CFA spent years grooming its ‘Olympic team’, sending two dozen promising youngsters to Germany for two years of special training under coach Eckhard Krautzun, who announced in 2006: “There should be and must be an aim for Chinese football to win a medal at the 2008 Olympics on home soil." The team played friendlies around the world, and even represented China at the Asian Games in Doha in 2006. A sign that things weren’t going quite to plan came last year, when a “friendly” training match against England’s Queen’s Park Rangers turned into a mass brawl, leaving one Chinese player with a broken jaw, another suspended, and an official from the English club under police investigation. Several coaches have been sacked, the most recent just a couple of months before the Olympics.
Speaking after the Brazil match, Olympic team captain Li Weifeng, another senior over-age player, suggested that Chinese football was probably on the same level as Brazilian table tennis (though some in China might see that as insult to Brazilian table tennis players.) The only silver lining seen by the media in the Olympic debacle is that it might finally lead to a real shake-up of the soccer bureaucracy, and send a wake-up call to the players, who are widely seen as spoild and—unlike most Chinese athletes—overpaid.
Yet others believe that the huge pressure of public expectation makes it hard for the national team to play well—and foreign players and coaches who have played in the Chinese league have complained that management is in fact too strict, with rigid training routines and players forced to live in team training camps, away from their families, for long periods. Whatever the truth, for the nation which claims to have invented the sport—see film director John Woo’s latest historical epic “Red Cliff” for a scene featuring a third century AD kickabout—it seems, for the moment, that soccer is very definitely not ‘coming home’
