China’s government has blamed corruption for the dismal track record of its men’s football team in a documentary featuring confessions of bribe-taking.
The final episode of the four-part documentary series, which highlights corruption broadly in the country, was broadcast on state television on Tuesday, just days before the start of the Asian Cup tournament seen as a major opportunity for Chinese football to prove that it is on the mend.
It comes amid a years-long investigation into the underperformance of the men’s football team after a string of humiliating defeats to countries like Vietnam and Syria, and the failure to qualify for the 2022 World Cup. The narrator of the show likened investigating corruption in the sport to “scraping the bone to remove the poison”.
China’s men’s football team is ranked 79th in the world by Fifa, in sharp contrast to the women’s side that is just inside the top 20 in 19th place.
Chen Xuyuan, former chairman of the Chinese Football Association, said in his confession that he was greeted with two backpacks containing 300,000 yuan ($42,000) each from local officials the night before he was named the chief of the governing body, and took in tens of millions of yuan from clubs in total.
Li Tie, former coach of the men’s team, admitted he signed a 60-million-yuan deal with a now-defunct club in Wuhan to pick four players into the national team. The club’s former chairman said he blushed when he saw their names: “I know what our players are capable of. There’s no way they could get in.”
“Football fans can tolerate the backwardness of Chinese football, but not corruption,” Chen said. “There’s no remedy for bygones. If there’s one, I’m willing to pay for that with my life.”
Chen and Li have both been charged for bribery.
Televised confessions are commonly used by the Chinese government, with the most notable of these being an eight-part miniseries in 2016, Always on the Road, that featured high-level officials captured by President Xi Jinping’s anti-graft campaign.
The football graft investigation has ensnared at least 14 cadres to date, with dozens of coaches, players, referees and club executives investigated, the documentary said.
Du Zhaocai, former deputy director of the General Administration of Sports of China, was arrested in October on suspicion of taking bribes and was stripped of his party membership. When authorities ordered an investigation into corruption, Du only produced a research report without naming any problems or punishing anyone, according to the show.
“I didn’t play a good role as goalkeeper in the corruption fight of Chinese football,” Du confessed.
President Xi has made stamping out corruption a core policy since he took power in 2012, and the extension of that campaign to football is part of the goal to rejuvenate the nation. Xi, a football fan, has also staked his promise of the “China dream” on the ability of the country to become a sports superpower, in which football is meant to play a leading role.
“Developing and revitalising Chinese football is an inevitable requirement for building a sports superpower, and it is also the expectation of the broad masses of the people,” the documentary said.
In 2015, a Communist Party group led by Xi unveiled a sweeping plan to recharge the sport in China, including building more football schools to have a steady talent pipeline, and installing a professional and clean governing body. The medium-term goal was for the men’s team to reach the top in Asia.
But things did not progress as planned for Chinese football. Its clubs are mired in financial crisis as generous real estate developers that were big backers of the sport are themselves in the midst of a deep property slump. Foreign players who had been given Chinese citizenship to help boost the performance of the national team have renounced their passports.
The men’s team, which is currently in Qatar preparing for an Asian Cup match against Tajikistan on Saturday, along with training staff will also be required to watch the episode, according to the Beijing News. Last week, China lost in a friendly against 150th-ranked Hong Kong.
Chinese fans have long complained about the men’s team’s dismal performance, especially compared to the women’s team, which won the Asian Cup in 2022. A meme that circulates on the Chinese internet mocking the team features an interview with players who said they have been eating expensive sea cucumbers as supplements.
Yun Sun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank, said that beyond corruption, other factors such as the centralised way of managing football right from the top of government is also much to blame for the poor development of the sport.
“The top-down approach is the core of the problem, but the top cannot acknowledge it either,” said Sun. “Corruption is only one piece of it.”