Football is undoubtedly the most popular sport in China. Politically, football in China is on much less solid ground.

Chinese who have followed their men’s national team over the past two decades are very familiar with the phrase, “There is not much time left for the Chinese team.” As the team has struggled to win every important and decisive game since 2002, their poor performance has led Chinese football commentators to unwillingly repeat this phrase in their in-game commentary. In 2022, when the team was blocked from the World Cup again, it seemed that time was really running out for Chinese men’s football.

It is not new for the Chinese government to use sports as a tool to serve broad sociopolitical ends, particularly for generating feelings of national unity, inculcating social cohesion, encouraging patriotic citizenship, and forging a shared national identity. Football’s mass base explains why the party-state decided to include it in their prestigious, comprehensively deepening reform project and has invested significant financial and reputational capital in the top-down direction of football development since 2015. China’s football industry was worth 125.9 billion RMB in 2016.

The expansive timescale, from 2016 to 2050, of the reform plan ensures more consistent policy as it crosses seven full Five-Year Plans. The medium-term objective is to ensure the national men’s team becomes a leading force in Asian football by 2030. However, 2022 could be the year that diverts the reform toward a bleak future.

Collapse of the Professional League

China’s professional football leagues have been the foundation for its national team, but they have imploded in the last two years just as spectacularly as they burst on the scene ten years ago. In 2020, 16 football clubs in the lower-tier leagues shut down operations for financial reasons. Another six joined them the next year. In February 2021, the collapse of Jiangsu FC, the reigning Chinese Super League (CSL) champion, sent shockwaves through the Chinese soccer world. That September, Guangzhou FC, by far the most successful club in China, also stared into the abyss when its parent company, Evergrande Group, the second-largest property developer in China, found itself on the verge of collapse. Evergrande has committed to continue operating the club, but the annual budget was reduced to 15 million RMB, which is 200 times less than the budget in 2019.

The 2022 CSL season is about to kick-off on 23 April. There are about a dozen clubs with concerns about their ability to participate in the new season due to the inability to pay their players’ salaries and the utility bills at their training complexes. In order to ensure the league continues on schedule, the Chinese Football Association will allow clubs to owe players’ salaries until 2023. Most of these players have to accept this solution as there is no other option for them.

This unhealthy operation and the disregard for the interests of players pose a profound threat to the future of Chinese football. They essentially undermine the confidence of Chinese parents in professional football. It is very likely that we will see youth football participation decrease at an alarming rate in the next couple of years.

Disharmonising the society

Naturalising non-Chinese players was expected to enhance the men’s national team’s performance and improve the odds of qualifying for the 2022 World Cup. Additionally, it was used as a tool to show China as an open and inclusive great power.

Although naturalisation of football players is a common practice in many other countries, the increasing number of naturalised foreign-born players on the national team has brought up an unprecedented identity paradox in Chinese society. People have started to ask: what does it take to become Chinese? Although many of these new Chinese have assumed Han ethnic identity, antagonists were concerned that these “new Chinese” lack a sense of Chinese national (ethnic) identity and have little need for Chinese national honour.

This question has become increasingly common after the national team failed in the qualifier stage and left these naturalised players unable to integrate into Chinese society.

While these players have expressed their loyalty to the nation and contributed significant effort to promoting Chinese national team football, they are still considered foreigners given the ethnic and cultural difference.

Recently, a quarrel between Chinese football players, practitioners, and comedians over the overpaid and underperforming men’s national football team has gone viral. More than 320 million netizens on Weibo believe that the men’s national football team is the shame of China. So, rather than enhancing the national cohesion, the national men’s football has perversely become a source of social disharmony.

Geopolitics and international boycott

More detrimental to Chinese football development and making the football dream come true is the entanglement of sports and geopolitical conflict. While international sport federations have always liked to consider themselves above politics and claimed that the sentiment that “sport is separate from politics” has dictated their actions, reality often proves the opposite. The International Olympic Committee acquiesced to several states’ diplomatic boycotts of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic due to China’s “human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang.” One month later, FIFA suspended Russia from international competition due to its invasion of Ukraine.

Cross-strait tensions have escalated in the recent years. The reelection of Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen in 2020, with her pro-independence doctrine, has provoked Beijing. Meanwhile, Beijing has taken increasingly aggressive actions, including by flying fighter jets near the island. Although a peaceful unification is favoured by Beijing, the likelihood of military conflict should not be ruled out as Chinese leader Xi Jinping highlighted that China “must be and will be reunified.”

China’s enormous influence in the global political and economic sphere is unmatched by Russia. But will the influence be powerful enough to lever the international community to give China leeway should Chinese leaders decide to use military action realise the unification? China’s international activities, including its national sports teams, will likely be boycotted.

It is true that Xi Jinping has made no secret of his desire to see China at the top of world football. He has publicity announced his three World Cup dreams: qualifying for the World Cup, hosting the World Cup, and winning a World Cup title. But it would be naïve to believe the leader will set aside the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation to make way for the negligible football dream.

A well-known Chinese idiom says “favorable time geographic advantages, and the unity of the people all must be in place. If not, victory will be costly.” The three elements of victory for China’s football reform seem to have gone in 2022, and the pragmatic Chinese government will not stubbornly invest more financial and reputational resources in football beyond 2050.

Dr Ye Xue is a research associate at Australia National University. He specialises in non-Western international relations theory, Chinese foreign policy, Australia-China relations, and sports politics.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.