Chinese football is being purged of corruption

In the football structures of China, a grandiose anti-corruption campaign is being carried out, the victims of which have already been about a dozen high-ranking functionaries. The purges were initiated amid the Chinese football crisis. In the second half of the last decade, he surprised by the scale of his investments in players in much the same way that Saudi Arabia surprises them now, but instead of taking off, he experienced a fall that resulted in an outflow of foreigners from the country and tremendous financial problems for local clubs.

On Wednesday, global news outlets and publications such as China Daily told that the head of the Chinese Football Super League (CSL) Liu Jun became a defendant in the investigation conducted by the anti-corruption authorities of China. The news of his arrest, however, did not turn into a big sensation, for obvious reasons. The fact is that the case of Liu Jun is just another link in an already very long chain of events that began last year.

We are talking about a grandiose anti-corruption campaign initiated in the football industry by the Chinese Communist Party. Over the past few months, about a dozen functionaries have already become its victims.

Among them are the President of the China Football Federation (CFA) Chen Xuian, a number of key employees of the organization, and head coach of the national team Li Te. Chinese authorities have never commented in detail on why law enforcement turned their attention to these officials. However, from the reports of various media resources, it can be concluded that, for example, Chen Xuyan is suspected of too active lobbying for Li Te’s candidacy for a coaching position, including even pressure on the Wuhan club, where he worked, in order to force his management to pay debts to the specialist for salary, as well as uncleanliness when concluding a sponsorship contract with Nike. In fact, he made the company a monopoly in the Chinese football market. Nike, thanks to the agreement, has become the uncontested outfitter for all local clubs (CFA actually completely controls CSL) and teams, while some experts pointed out that this state of affairs is completely inconsistent with international practice: it provides for the existence of competition between kit manufacturers.

However, it is absolutely clear that the anti-corruption campaign was provoked not so much by individual cases related to officials in charge of Chinese football, but by much more serious problems.

Namely, the crisis that he is going through and which looks especially acute against the backdrop of paintings from the not so distant past.

In 2015, the Chinese government presented a football development strategy. According to this plan, the idea of ​​which is believed to have been personally proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, the country’s national team, which occupies a modest position in the international hierarchy, was to reach the status of the strongest in Asia by 2030, and by 2050 – in the world as a whole. No matter how utopian the strategy may seem, something proving that China is ready for a lot to realize its ambitions happened very soon. It turned out that the clubs representing him, the existence of which until now very few people knew, could spend colossal money on foreign stars.

In 2016, the SCL teams invested almost $500 million in newcomers (among them there were many real celebrities like Oscar, Hulk, Alex Teixeira, Paulinho, Yannick Carrasco, Ramiris). In terms of summer spending, the league entered the top five most generous. In addition, she attracted well-known coaches to work – for example, the Italian Marcello Lippi. Such acquisitions, as conceived by the authors of the Chinese concept of the development of football, were to increase interest in it and provoke the growth of the industry. In general, Saudi Arabia, now striking in its extravagance in the name of filling its championship with superstars, is only repeating the experiment of another Asian state.

Chinese, however, turned into a crash. At the beginning of this decade, it turned out that almost all the clubs that had just squandered money were experiencing colossal financial problems. In the past four years, 39 teams from different leagues have ceased to exist because of them, and even the main giants with a bunch of titles in their track record – Guangzhou Evergrande, Jiangsu – were included in this list. Legionnaires during this period amicably left CSL, and its media rights were rapidly depreciating. In 2015, a five-year contract to own them cost China Sports Media more than $1 billion. Now CSL’s revenue is about 15 times less.

April this year CNN published a large study on the Chinese football crash, highlighting two main factors that led to it.

The first is an objective factor. The deterioration of the situation in CSL coincided with the coronavirus pandemic. Its negative impact on Chinese football was extremely strong due to the super-tight restrictions in place compared to European ones in the country. Spoiled by disruptions and postponements of matches, plus the absence of spectators in the stands, were as many as three seasons, during which the clubs were practically deprived of matchday income, and sponsorship income sank seriously. But the CNN study also points to clear mistakes made by Chinese football management. To them, the authors, for example, attributed the decision to introduce a gigantic luxury tax on the purchase of foreign players – one hundred percent of their value, which at the end of the last decade significantly reduced the demand for legionnaires and the level of the championship that was gaining popularity.

Alexey Dospekhov