“It’s really serious, and it’s obviously unusual at the level of those being investigated and detained,” said Mark Dreyer, a sports expert who has followed the Chinese football industry for many years. Beyond football.”

In contrast to this, the Chinese professional league has fallen into chaos following three years of the new crown epidemic and a series of failed decisions by the Football Association-many clubs have disbanded one following another, and high-paid foreign players have also left one following another.

At the same time, the performance of the Chinese national team – especially the men’s football team – has been criticized repeatedly. The latest world ranking of the Chinese men’s football team is outside the 80th place, and the goal of qualifying for the World Cup seems to be getting further and further away.

Less than ten years following Xi Jinping launched a major reform plan for Chinese football shortly following taking office, Chinese football seems to be facing another defeat. The high-level football association responsible for this reform has been investigated for corruption, which is considered to be the most obvious proof.

Much remains unknown regarding the scale and details of this anti-corruption operation. This is the part we know so far.

On November 26 last year, China’s Hubei Province officially reported that Li Tie, the former head coach of the men’s football team, was suspected of serious violations of the law and was being investigated by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the Hubei Provincial Supervisory Committee.

According to media reports, he was taken away suddenly while participating in the coach training class of the Chinese Football Association, and he has not appeared in public view since then.

Li Tie was a Chinese national footballer in his player days, and represented the national team in the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup—the only Chinese men’s football team’s experience in the World Cup finals so far. After that, he played for the Premier League team Everton pause).

After retiring, Li Tie has coached two Chinese clubs, Hebei Huaxia and Wuhan Zall, and led the team to the Chinese Super League.

During the 2022 Qatar World Cup qualifiers, he served as the head coach of the Chinese national team, but quickly “dismissed” following leading the team to try to reach the finals and failed.

During the World Cup qualifiers before get out of class, Li Tie was criticized by fans for his controversies in public and on social media, and was even accused of “carrying goods” on Weibo following a game.

Some Chinese media reported that his suspected violation of the law was related to the fact that he was still working as a “fake coach” at the club and receiving a salary following serving as the coach of the national team, but the BBC might not independently verify the relevant details.

“It’s really hard to draw conclusions regarding why this happened and when it happened, because there’s so little public information,” Dreyer said.

He believes that the reporters who disclosed the details of Li Tie’s investigation in recent months probably did not know regarding the relevant matters recently, but were only recently instructed to disclose them. The accuracy of such details is difficult to ascertain.

In the months following Li Tie was investigated, Liu Yi, former secretary-general of the Chinese Football Association, Chen Yongliang, executive deputy secretary-general of the Chinese Football Association and head of the national team management department, Chen Xuyuan, chairman of the Chinese Football Association, Wang Xiaoping, director of the Disciplinary Committee of the Chinese Football Association, and Huang Xiaoping, director of the Chinese Football Association’s competition department. Song, Yu Hongchen, the former vice chairman of the Chinese Football Association, Dong Zheng, the former general manager of the Chinese Super League, and Du Zhaocai, the deputy director of the General Administration of Sports of China who is also the party secretary of the Football Association, have also been investigated successively.

Among them, Chen Xuyuan, chairman of the Chinese Football Association, was officially notified on February 14 that he was suspected of serious violations of laws and disciplines and was investigated. A day later, the Chinese Football Association issued an announcement stating that it “resolutely supports” the investigation of Chen Xuyuan by the discipline inspection and supervision agencies.

Chen Xuyuan was previously the chairman of the Chinese Super League club Shanghai SIPG (later renamed Shanghai Seaport), and an executive of a state-owned enterprise who was born as a dock worker. As the first chairman outside the sports bureaucratic system in the history of the Chinese Football Association, when he took office in 2016, he was regarded by the outside world as one of the iconic figures for the decoupling of the Chinese Football Association from the General Administration of Sports and the implementation of the “separation of management and management” reform.

During his tenure, he made many high-profile speeches advocating reform and anti-corruption. After he was investigated, he was repeatedly quoted by the media. He once warned the players that “football is a noble sport, don’t let money be tarnished and distorted.” .

Du Zhaocai is the highest-ranking official “sacked” in the current round of anti-corruption storms.

Li Xi, secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said in March that he would “intensively investigate and promote the resolution of corruption in the sports field, especially football, and deep-seated system and mechanism problems.”

In 2015, China seemed very determined to use football as a national development plan.

The Reform Leading Group headed by President Xi Jinping, who is widely regarded as a football fan, deliberated and approved the “Overall Plan for the Reform and Development of Chinese Football” in that year, and formulated a medium- and long-term plan a year later. In 2009, it became a world-class football powerhouse.

Some of these ambitious plans include establishing 50,000 football-specific schools across China by 2025.

The Chinese Football Association, which has many corruption scandals in history, also announced reforms, claiming to separate from the General Administration of Sports.

For a country that quickly became the world’s second largest economy within decades of its establishment, the outside world was once full of expectations for this grand plan.

At that time, Chinese football also seemed to be booming. A large number of giant companies invested money, making the Chinese professional league comparable to the top European leagues in terms of money investment. Many world-class stars also joined Chinese clubs with high salaries.

According to statistics from the German transfer market (Transfermarkt), a football transfer data agency, in 2015-16 following the reform plan was announced, the total transfer fee of the Chinese Super League exceeded 450 million US dollars, and it entered the top five transfer fees in the world. , which rose to $576 million.

World-class stars including Brazilian international Oscar (Oscar), Paulinho (Paulinho), and Argentine international Carlos Tevez (Davis) all joined the Super League team with high salaries during this period.

In order to improve the record of the men’s national team in a short period of time, Chinese football also implemented a naturalization policy for the first time. Another British-born Jiang Guangtai (Tyias Browning), as well as Brazilian-born Elkeson (Elkeson), Luo Guofu (Aloísio) and other players have also successively entered the Chinese national team through naturalization.

But less than a decade following the reform program began, the plans as a whole have suffered major setbacks.

Under the three-year lockdown of the new crown epidemic, the Chinese Super League, which once boasted that it would become the “sixth largest league in the world”, has regressed at an alarming rate.

During the epidemic prevention and control period, the Chinese Super League came and went, and even when there were games, they might only play in empty venues without spectators, which severely hit ticket revenue and sponsor enthusiasm.

On the other hand, a number of new regulations implemented by the Chinese Football Association on professional leagues have also proved to be failed decisions followingwards.

During Chen Xuyuan’s tenure, he required that the names of Chinese clubs be “neutralized” and corporate sponsorship was not allowed. This is considered to have seriously dampened the confidence of investors in the league that has relied on corporate sponsorship since its professionalization.

In addition, policies such as requiring league teams to implement a “salary cap” in the name of curbing “golden dollar football” and imposing 100% “signing adjustment fees” on the acquisition of high-value foreign players have also caused clubs to significantly reduce investment , which in turn reduces the enthusiasm of fans and sponsors.

According to Chinese media reports, under the intervention of the Football Association and the impact of the epidemic, the broadcast copyright fee of the Super League in 2023 has shrunk by nearly 16 times compared to 2015.

Many high-value foreign players also announced their departure from China during this period. Some said it was because of the epidemic that they might not reunite with their families for a long time, while others said it was because the team might no longer afford their wages.

According to the statistics of the German transfer market, among the top 10 players transferred from the Chinese Super League since 2016, only Oscar is still in China, and the remaining 9 players have all left.

This is not only true for high-paid foreign aid, but many clubs also reported wage arrears during this period, and some teams had to be disbanded.

Among them is the 2021 Chinese Super League champion Jiangsu Suning, which announced its dissolution due to debt pressure a few months following winning the league championship.

In January of this year, the Wuhan Changjiang Club announced its disbandment, becoming the fourth disbanded Chinese Super League club in four years—and the 35th disbanded professional team in all professional leagues.

Chinese football “is in a desperately bad situation”, Dreyer said to BBC Chinese. He is the author of a book on China’s sports superpower, Sporting Superpower: An Insider’s View on China’s Quest to Be the Best.

“I’ve used the word ‘catastrophic’ to describe the current situation, but I’m really not exaggerating.”

Until two weeks ago, due to the turmoil in the management and the disbandment of various clubs, the competition system and the number of participating teams for the new year have not yet been determined.

Dreyer said that this is unimaginable in any semi-professional league in the world, let alone the Chinese Super League, which was determined to become one of the top leagues in the world.

“Only five years ago, the managers of the Premier League were saying, we need to watch China, its financial strength may enable it to compete at a world-class level,” Dreyer said, and now the vision feels like a “Light Years Away”.

In this context, the 2023 Chinese Super League just announced that it will start on April 15 a week ago, and the number of participating teams originally planned to increase to 18 remains at 16.

In the hasty and chaotic situation, the new season of the Chinese Football League is still full of unknowns from the outside world.

Dreyer said that it is worrying that corruption is still happening, but excessive administrative intervention may be the biggest resistance to Chinese football.

He believes that the anti-corruption that is currently taking place is more likely to reflect a policy shift-following the success of the Winter Olympics, more resources may be withdrawn from football and redirected to the traditional Olympic gold medal sport .

Eight years following the introduction of the reform plan, the situation facing Chinese football is similar to that in 2011. At that time, the Chinese football world had just experienced an unprecedented anti-corruption storm, and Vice President Xi Jinping, who had not yet become the top leader, publicly stated that he was a football player. Fans, will be committed to promoting the development of Chinese football.

“What we’re left with now is to get back where we started,” Dreyer said.