China soccer: It just makes them want to kick somebody
By EDWARD WONGAUG. 14, 2008
QINHUANGDAO, China — The crotch kick was the low point of the Olympic Games for hundreds of millions of Chinese sports fans.
It came 52 minutes into the China-Belgium men's soccer match on Sunday. A frustrated Chinese player, Tan Wangsong, swung his foot straight into the crotch of a Belgian player.
Within seconds, the victim was writhing in pain on the field, and Tan was given the first of two red-card penalties for the Chinese team that night (the second came when the team captain elbowed another player).
As usual, jokes about the Chinese team flew fast and furious around the Internet: "The Chinese team just won two red medals." "Our soccer team won the gold medal in martial arts." "China has had a weird year, with a freak snowstorm, the Tibetan riots and an earthquake, but the performance of our soccer team shows that some things never change."
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In its quest for superpower supremacy, China is placing its hopes for a top Olympic medal count on a panoply of athletes honed to near perfection: gymnasts, divers, rowers, table-tennis players, even a hurdler. The Chinese men's soccer team is not among them. Instead, after a 3-0 loss to Brazil in this coastal city on Wednesday, it is slouching away from the Summer Games with exactly what its legions of exhausted fans expected of it: nothing.
Soccer is the sport the Chinese care about above all else, but also the one that most frustrates and disappoints them. The men's national and Olympic teams are the objects of scorn, shame and hand-wringing. For Chinese men, finally proud that they have international sports icons like the basketball star Yao Ming and the hurdler Liu Xiang, the soccer team endures as the ultimate symbol of emasculation. After the Chinese women's soccer team beat Argentina, 2-0, on Tuesday, that team's coach, Shang Ruihua, said, "Our strikers did such a great job that I even told them they should start playing for our men's team now."
After the men's loss to Brazil, angry fans held a mini-protest outside the stadium that broke up when riot police showed up.
Soccer presents the ultimate conundrum for the Chinese sports machine: the country has the money, the population pool and the fan base to put together a world-class team, yet it has inexplicably failed to do so.
The men's national team has been to the World Cup only once, when Japan and Korea were the hosts in 2002. It failed to score a single goal. In 2004, Chinese fans nearly rioted in Beijing when China lost the Asian Cup final to Japan. The latest humiliation came in June, when the team lost to Iraq in a World Cup qualifying match.
Chinese leaders generally try to silence widespread criticism of national symbols, but so deep is the sense of shame surrounding men's soccer that the government has no choice but to allow people to vent.
Everyone has piled on: the state news media, including CCTV and Xinhua, celebrity sports bloggers, even other athletes and coaches. Fans also openly deride the head of the Chinese Football Association, Xie Yalong, a former senior official from Shaanxi Province. "Xie Yalong must resign!" was a loud chant at the last two Olympic matches. Xie left the Belgium match early.
Many Chinese sports analysts and scholars point to endemic corruption within the association as one root cause of the sport's ills. The association started the current league system in 1994, and soccer became the first sport to achieve commercial success in China, with sponsors pouring in millions of dollars.
Xu Guoqi of Kalamazoo College in Michigan and the author of a book on China and the Olympics said that soccer would only improve after the rule of law was established in China. In fact, he said, disappointment with soccer could lead to the next "major revolution" in China.
"Without rule of law, corruption will get involved, and nobody is responsible to anyone," said Xu, who wrote an opinion article in The Washington Post last month lamenting Chinese soccer. "If Chinese continue to be obsessed with soccer, they'll definitely demand something dramatic, something political or involving rule of law. It'll start with sports, and then it'll move onto something bigger."
Money is part of the problem, he said, with most Chinese male soccer players earning annual salaries of more than one million yuan, or $146,000. It goes to their heads, he said. "Most of the men's soccer players are poorly educated," Xu said. "One soccer player even tried to stab somebody to death in a bar fight."
The Chinese news media often report on the flashy lives that many soccer players apparently lead. In March 2007, a former goalkeeper for the national team, Liu Yunfei, was arrested on drug charges. Another goalie, An Qi, was caught with a prostitute in a hotel in 2005.
Women players in China are far more grounded, Xu said, perhaps because their salaries are just a hundredth or less of the men's. The national women's team, nicknamed the "Iron Roses," has seen relative success - it reached the World Cup final in 1999, where it lost, 4-5, to the United States in a penalty shootout.
Lu You, an anchor of a popular soccer program on CCTV, agreed that the outsized incomes, as well as high expectations, had crippled men's soccer. "If they win, we treat them as heroes," she said. "If they lose, we say, 'Go to hell."'
Other factors could be hobbling Chinese soccer, experts say. Perhaps there are too few children being encouraged to play soccer. Also, the state system of training athletes works well in sports where individuals excel - table tennis or gymnastics, for example - but falls short in soccer because of the sheer cost needed to sustain a team, some experts say.
Lu said that the government could easily invest $12 million to train a table-tennis player, but the resources needed to properly develop a soccer team are beyond the means of the state. A market-based system has to be put in place, he said.
On Wednesday night, Chinese fans tried to put aside their reservations about the men's team when they arrived at the stadium here for the Brazil match. They came with red-painted faces, draped in flags and wearing red headbands that said, "China must win!" The 33,000-seat stadium was nearly full.
The love among Chinese for "the beautiful game" was demonstrated by the loud welcome they gave the Brazilian players, especially Ronaldinho.
The cheers went up again when Diego scored the first goal of the night, for Brazil.
"I love their technique," said Cui Wei, 30, a high school teacher who had driven five hours to see the match.
"It's gentle and soft. They enjoy playing soccer while the Chinese view it as a fight."
Li, the Chinese captain, faced dozens of disappointed Chinese reporters after the game. "The Chinese people have intense wishes for a strong Chinese team, but we need more tolerance and time," he said. "Like you, we also want to improve, to make a change."
His dejected look said that perhaps he had taken to heart a common assessment of the team by Chinese fans: "There are two things stopping the Chinese soccer team from going outside Asia to take part in international games: their left feet and their right feet."
