Why can’t China play football?

It would be tough for any country to lose 7-0 in a World Cup qualifier, but when the losing team is China, and the thrashing is at the hands of arch-rival Japan, it is deeply humiliating. The defeat was ‘shameful’, according to an editorial last week in the Global Times, a state-controlled tabloid, while the Shanghai-based Oriental Sports Daily called it ‘disastrous’, adding: ‘When the taste of bitterness reaches its extreme, all that is left is numbness.’ Some commentators called for the men’s team to be disbanded, bemoaning that a country of 1.4 billion people could not find 11 men capable of winning a match.

While being awful on the field, it seems some Chinese players are world champions at wrongdoing

It is almost a decade since Xi Jinping, China’s supposedly football-mad President, launched a multi-billion dollar national crusade to turn the country into a footballing superpower. While China had forged ahead economically, the ultimate symbol of soft power remained a western stronghold, and that grip needed to be broken if China was to realise Xi’s ‘China Dream’ of becoming a truly great power. Ten years ago, China was ranked 81st in the world by Fifa, the sport’s governing body, just ahead of Sudan and Iraq. It now ranks 87th. Xi’s masterplan has been a colossal failure, on and off the field.

His vision was spelt out in ‘The Overall Chinese Football Reform and Development Programme’, published in 2015 with all the pizzazz of a state plan for steel, coal or pork production. The short-term goal was to create a ‘football management model with Chinese characteristics’. In the middle-term, the men’s team was to become the best in Asia before scaling ‘the highest global ranks’.