In October of 2015, Chinese media announced Xi Jinping’s first selfie. China’s leader looked uncharacteristically jolly posing alongside the soccer star Sergio Aguero and then-British Prime Minister David Cameron, with Aguero snapping the trio’s photo. It quickly went viral. Argentine striker Aguero became an overnight sensation and his team, Manchester City, scooped up a sizable Chinese fanbase.

“Every person in the world asks me about the selfie,” Aguero later said. 

Xi was in the UK for a state visit. But on his final day, he made time to enjoy a Manchester City training session. A lifelong soccer fan, Xi soaked up the atmosphere at the English Premier League club. But it was more than simple fun. Just eight months earlier, Xi had launched his “Overall Plan for Chinese Football Reform and Development” — a pledge to transform the game’s development in China, from top to bottom. 

Its goals were manifold. Healthcare costs were skyrocketing, and China’s success winning medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics had whetted Xi’s appetite for soft power. He decided soccer, the world’s most popular sport, would improve China’s fitness, on and off the field.

“Professional sport — and football as its icon — is the last western stronghold upon which China has not yet imposed its stature,” says Aaron Smith, professor of sport business at Loughborough University.

China qualified for its first World Cup in 2002, prompting soccer-mania across the country. But the Chinese Super League (CSL), the country’s top division, was long tainted by corruption and financial losses. It was particularly painful that the national team ranked outside soccer’s top 50 nations, while Japan and Korea dominated in Asia. 

Xi’s reforms promised to build the grassroots game and make its national teams global forces. International and domestic soccer would be harnessed to create “a football management model with Chinese characteristics,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared,The plan called for increasing the number of schools that “specialized” in soccer from 5,000 to 20,000 in 2020. By 2025, Xi wanted China’s sports industry value to increase from $50 billion to $800 billion. (The entire planet’s sports market value was $1 trillion in 2014.) And by 2050, he declared, China would be recognized as a global soccer power.

“My biggest hope for Chinese soccer is that its teams become among the world’s best,” Xi said. 

Almost immediately, China’s ultra-rich decanted wealth into the game with an aim — on paper, at least — of fortifying Xi’s plan. Broadcaster Tiao Dongli (China Sports Media) paid $1.3 billion for the rights over five years to the CSL,¹The Chinese Super League 26 times the $50 million paid in 2013. Tech firm Le Eco purchased multimedia rights for $420 million.

High-rollers shelled out for elite players in their prime to join China’s premier tournament, including burly Brazilian forward Givanildo Vieira de Sousa, better known as Hulk and Belgian midfielder Axel Witsel. Shanghai Shenhua, owned by real estate firm Greenland Holdings, even boasted the world’s highest paid soccer player when it signed Argentine striker Carlos Tevez to a $40 million a year contract in 2017. 

Chinese tycoons flashed cash in Europe too, buying stakes in some of its prized clubs. Just months after Xi’s selfie with Aguero, China Media Capital, an investment firm, bought 13 percent of Manchester City’s parent company for $400 million. Big box retailer Suning, founded by billionaire entrepreneur Zhang Jindong, acquired 69 percent of Italy’s Inter Milan for $306 million, promising the club would “return to its glory days.”

More telling, perhaps, was Zhang’s statement that the move would “help Suning to grow internationally.” For the CCP, having handfuls of its recently-minted mega-rich buying soccer clubs from France to the Czech Republic was a good, if pricey, way to advertise China’s economic might, and draw attention back to the CSL. For investors, it was a chance to curry favor with Xi, scale their businesses, and — spoken quietly — offshore their wealth. 

“These guys are businessmen, and they’ve basically never been able to take their money out of China,” says Mark Dreyer, an analyst at China Sports Insider. “The development of Chinese football was not their top priority.”

Nevertheless, by 2017, Chinese investors had ploughed $2.5 billion into the global game, all with the projected goal of improving their country’s standard of soccer. 

Europe’s top clubs capitalized as well. They sold players to the CSL for exorbitant fees, toured in China, and erected sprawling training facilities. Bayern Munich, Germany’s most illustrious club, now has three soccer academies in China. 

All of European soccer was chasing riches in a 1.4 billion-strong market, and the lucrative broadcast deals it could reap. The race was on.

“Not only had China made a colossal investment into football infrastructure, the vehemence of President’s Xi’s football ambitions also mobilized an enormous economic rush around sport in general, with football being the beachhead,” Smith says.

In some respects, Xi’s vision succeeded. Today, soccer has either caught up with or surpassed basketball as China’s most-watched sport, depending on the source (some say basketball is the game to play, soccer the game to watch). The CSL’s 16 clubs attract an average attendance of 24,076 — higher than leagues in soccer-crazy states like Brazil and France (Germany’s Bundesliga ranks first with 43,302). China’s national women’s team has also performed well on the world stage, competing in seven World Cups and currently ranking a respectable 15th.

Their male counterparts, however, are still languishing — now in 75th place, behind even the United Arab Emirates, a country with 1/143rd China’s population. And while the CSL is popular, it increasingly looks like a house of cards. Inter Milan’s Suning also owns the CSL’s league champion, Jiangsu, which it shuttered under financial strain on March 1, just three months after lifting the trophy.

The financial uncertainty has spread to Europe, whose top clubs have lost millions in ticket sales due to the pandemic. Inter Milan lost $120 million last year and is reportedly seeking emergency cash to stay afloat. Historic clubs from France to the Czech Republic are suffering hangovers from short-lived Chinese dreams.

“These big Chinese companies piled on to score brownie points with the government,” says Cameron Wilson, a Shanghai-based journalist and founder of the website Wild East Football. “But anyone could see it wasn’t sustainable.” 

Champion teams disappearing into thin air, Wilson adds, is a reminder of how far the sport still has to go in China: “It’s quite sobering. That kind of thing wouldn’t happen in a ‘football country.’” 

Indeed, while Xi hoped to marshal China’s collective spirit behind the “beautiful game,” in reality he’d welcomed a fleet of vultures to feast on it. It will take a gigantic U-turn to get his plan back on track.

“Football everywhere tends to overlap with politics in some ways,” says Wilson, “but in China it’s not just overlapping, it’s intermingled. And that’s the problem.”

THE RISE AND FALL OF CUJU

England fans often break into choruses of “Football’s Coming Home,” when their national team takes to the field. But while it’s true that top-hatted wonks sketched the modern game’s first rules in a London pub in 1863, soccer’s true roots lie east. 

Beginning in the 3rd century AD, Han Dynasty Chinese played cuju, or “kick ball,” with teams of 12 to 16 players trying to score in a single, central net. The game peaked during the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD), when professional players entertained festivals and banquets, and roaming kickballers wandered the land like Japanese rōnin, searching for a team. Military officers used cuju to keep the rank-and-file fit and disciplined. FIFA, global soccer’s governing body, officially recognizes it as the earliest-known form of soccer.

But cuju fell out of favor in the 14th century. And the history of modern Chinese soccer boasts little of its forerunner’s glory. In the early 1990s the country had no professional league, and its national players were known to smoke cigarettes and stay up until 3 am before matches playing cards. When China lost 1-0 to Hong Kong — a national embarrassment — in 1991, leaders turned to Germany’s Klaus Schlappner to be their national side’s first foreign coach.

“Schlappi,” as he’s known, was a master electrician, and drew on the culture of vocational training that had helped make Germany four-time World Cup champion, to knock his new charges into shape.

“We changed the diet, changed the medical care, changed the daily schedule, changed training times, and above all changed the personal lives of the players,” he says.

It paid off. In his first year at the helm, China placed third in the Asian Cup, and won the subsequent year’s King’s Cup, an invitational event in Thailand. It was “a sensation,” says Schlappner, with leader Deng Xiaoping, a keen soccer player himself, faxing Schlappner congratulations or advice after each game. (Deng reportedly played as a winger in his youth, and Mao Zedong kept goal.)

China’s top domestic division, then named the Jia-A League, went pro in 1994. But it didn’t prevent players from falling prey to business interests, which corrupted the game to such an extent that sponsors pulled out, referees were jailed, and players and coaches were regularly accused of match-fixing. Rumors swirled, too, that spots on the national squad were up for sale. Schlappner blames corrupt officials for China’s failure to reach the 1994 World Cup, in the U.S.

Authorities renamed and rebranded the Jia-A League the CSL in 2004. But while it attracted the odd fading star or journeyman from Europe, Africa or South America, it was largely a soccer scrapyard, populated by has-beens collecting a pension, or never-would-bes with canny agents.

When China swept to the top of the Olympic medal table in 2008, then-vice president Xi conceded that “the level of Chinese football is relatively low… China must be determined to boost soccer, but this might take a long time.”

Then, in 2013, Xi became president. Soon after, he enacted his plan to revive the great game of cuju.

“I wouldn’t say it was a surprise,” says Qi Peng, a lecturer in Chinese sport policy and management at Manchester Metropolitan University. “The main difference between the 2015 reform and previous ones is that the former was much more radical, and at the same time, much needed.”

It didn’t take long for observers to recognize the limits of Xi’s top-down decree — even Chinese fans. For starters, all the money in the world didn’t seem to be helping the domestic game. When, in 2016, the Chinese national team lost 1-0 to Syria, a team cobbled together amid a civil war, Chinese fans protested in the street. It was a rare outburst of enmity against Beijing’s soccer leadership.

Fans realized it’s quite easy to push [the CCP’s] buttons, and take control back.

Mark Dreyer, an analyst at China Sports Insider

There were protests in Europe as well, albeit for different reasons. In November 2017, a China under-20 tour of Germany ended less than a game in, when fans unfurled a Tibetan flag at a provincial stadium in Mainz, near Frankfurt. 

“It was a big deal,” says Tobias Ross, a former marketing manager for the Bundesliga. “Chinese interest generally shifted to other countries for some time.”

Similar protests broke out across Europe, as fans bit back at the flood of Chinese money entering the game unchecked. 

“Fans realized it’s quite easy to push [the CCP’s] buttons, and take control back,” says Dreyer.

By 2017, the honeymoon was over. With China’s economy slowing, the CCP prioritized internal investment. It labeled the oligarchs’ European stakes “irrational.” Many sold up and left, leaving clubs in the lurch. Wang Jianlin, the owner of the Wanda conglomerate that had bought 20 percent of Atlético Madrid, was strongarmed into divesting the stake in February 2018. Slavia Prague’s owner, CEFC China Energy founder Ye Jianming, did the same a year later.²Ye was detained by China on corruption charges and his firm, which tried to do business with Hunter Biden (son of Joe Biden) was taken over by the state.

Foreign lollygaggers were turning the CSL into a farce, too. Carlos Tevez scored just four times in 20 appearances for Shenhua, before returning to his boyhood club in Buenos Aires. “In South America and Europe, players learn to play football when they’re kids, but not here. So technically they are not very good,” he told a French broadcaster. “I don’t think they are going to get to the same heights, not even in 50 years.”

The CCP responded by making teams field more young Chinese players and — crucially — slapping a 100 percent tax on the transfer of foreign players. Foreign players’ salaries were capped at $3.6 million (Chinese players’ salaries at $790,000), and clubs were told to scrap corporate names, in an attempt to wrest a more sustainable-looking league. 

“Investing millions in the game is a treadmill to nowhere,” says Tom Byer, a Tokyo-based soccer coach who worked with China’s Ministry of Education to direct their soccer school program. “It’s a false economy. It was never going to work because it never has worked.”

‘SIT DOWN AND POLITELY APPLAUD’

For critics of Xi’s initiatives like Byer, the fatal flaw in soccer “with Chinese characteristics,” as the CCP conceived it, was that it left little room to build passion for the game. Foreign coaches marveled at kids’ games played in total silence, even having to teach their young charges to celebrate scoring a goal, and parents struggled to view soccer as anything but a distraction from China’s cut-throat academic system. 

“The kids basically have to spend all their waking life preparing for the Gao Kao [the higher education exam],” says Wilson, the Shanghai-based journalist. “They start kids doing homework even when they’re in kindergarten.”

Byer believes — and science appears to agree with him — that the “golden age” in a child’s soccer development is between three and six. World-beating players like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Kylian Mbappé inherited a love for the game from their families, and learned ball skills the moment they could walk. 

Many of China’s 514,000 schools have tried to encourage the game in younger children, but Wilson says the overall sports culture is still insufficient, in large part because the game is seen as frivolous. 

“There’s just so much everyday pressure in Chinese peoples’ lives to take care of the bottom line,” he says. “There are so many times when football has to give way to other priorities.”

In China, he adds, you don’t see people playing soccer in the park on the weekends. And without that grassroots culture for the game, no amount of money — either from CSL owners or European clubs — can help homegrown talent flourish.

Stefan Szymanski, professor of sports management at the University of Michigan and co-author of the influential book Soccernomics, believes the soft power gained by China’s impressive athletics record may have clouded the CCP’s soccer judgement. 

For the Olympics, Szymanski says, China set out with a top-down policy of identifying young athletes and training them up for a dozen years. It worked, he says, “because effectively most of these Olympic sports are exercises in biomechanics, and any well-trained biomechanic specialist can get these athletes to perform.”

“But football is absolutely not susceptible to that kind of development,” he adds. “It’s probably the one sport in the world where, actually, you have to give people the freedom to express themselves in order to create talent. That’s completely antithetical to the Chinese Communist Party.”

This mismatch is also evident in China’s approach to fans. Domestic fandom is another way to cultivate a soccer culture, but again, observers say, Xi’s top-down reforms have backfired. In recent years, security at stadiums has tightened, and Chinese fan groups modeled on Europe and South America’s “ultras” were threatened or banished from clubs. 

“Fan culture couldn’t be lower on the list of priorities” for the CCP, says Dreyer. “It stands for all the things the Chairman doesn’t like: People standing around, getting a little rowdy. They just want people to sit down and politely applaud.”

The way fans have always been treated in China is one of the reasons why the domestic game has failed to develop.

Jonathan Sullivan, director of China Programs at the University of Nottingham

Fans are also expected to put up with a lot. Authorities have outlawed flares, flags and alcohol. When the city of Hangzhou hosted the three-day G20 summit in 2016, its local club, Zhejiang FC, was forced to play 750 miles away in Dalian — for a month. The constant changes in the CSL — from shirt colors to crests, to teams moving cities and even shutting down — is anathema to the tradition that underpins Europe’s fierce fan loyalty. Very few CSL matches are sell-outs, and since 2015 attendance has stagnated.

“As always in Chinese domestic football, fans just have to suck it up,” says Jonathan Sullivan, director of China Programs at the University of Nottingham. “The way fans have always been treated in China is one of the reasons why the domestic game has failed to develop.”

In fact, contrary to Xi’s goals, some observers say that soccer’s recent troubles in China may end up aiding Europe’s clubs. The less fans visit domestic matches, the more they watch foreign games in bars, or on connected devices. Suning’s downfall precipitated the Premier League’s cancellation of its $750 million broadcast deal in China last September. But TV rights still hold huge potential. 

“If you can broadcast to all of China, then you have one of the biggest broadcast markets in the world,” says Layne Vandenberg, a PhD student at King’s College London. “And if you look at China compared to the EU, you’re dealing with one or two broadcasters, rather than 27 national broadcasters. It’s just efficient.”

Loyalty to European clubs is still very much up for grabs, she adds, and Chinese fans will happily follow two or three sides simultaneously, an alien concept elsewhere. 

European clubs have been slow to offer Chinese-language content, but Vandenberg believes digital efforts offer a significant opportunity for European clubs trying to win over Chinese followers. Recently, clubs began rolling out China-specific programs on Weibo and Douyin, apps home to 523 million and 600 million users. 

Moreover, to make someone a fan nowadays, you don’t need anyone to play the sport. Esports, or competitive video gaming, was worth $112 billion in China last year, up 44 percent from the previous year. And with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) now driving a cottage industry of soccer cards, fantasy competitions and other affiliate markets, China’s true soccer value may not be on the field but online.

Simon Chadwick, professor of Eurasian sport at the Emlyon Business School in France, says China doesn’t have to be any good at soccer in order to get in the game. 

“The narrative in the West seems to have been that China wanted to win the World Cup by 2050,” he says. “My view is that that was a misreporting of what China’s ambitions actually are. The official line is that China wants to be a leading FIFA nation by 2050, and now, being a leading nation can mean a lot of things.”

Indeed, while it is tempting to say that Xi’s soccer dream was a failure, many observers see hope. Since 2015, China has installed officials in prominent positions at FIFA, and China had more FIFA sponsors at the 2018 World Cup — seven — than any other nation. The growing ability of Chinese corporations and the state to leverage their foothold in soccer to exercise political and economic soft power, Smith says, is already “a stunning success.”

It has not yet been able to “wash” human-rights issues in soccer, however. Last year FC Köln (Cologne), one of Germany’s top clubs, stymied a Chinese sponsorship deal, and canceled plans to build an academy, when one of its leaders described China as a “totalitarian and brutal dictatorship.” This week Shanghai Shenhua photoshopped out the swooshes of their players’ Nike training kits, after the American apparel multinational denounced alleged forced labor in Xinjiang.

The extent to which Chinese citizens’ health has improved, meanwhile, will not be measured until a CCP report appears later this year. But Smith thinks “the scope and scale of health pursuits, strongly through the football ascendency strategy, have been so prodigious that their impact will be transformative.” 

Still, says Szymanski, “the ultimate projection of soft power is to win the World Cup” — a move that is both irresistible for a soccer fan like Xi Jinping and, for the foreseeable future at least, out of China’s reach.

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