Anyone notice how China’s absent from the World Cup?
When teams from 32 nations gather for the World Cup in South Africa this month, one country will be most conspicuous by its absence and that is China. China may be the world's most populous country along with being the new sporting powerhouse of the world, winning the highest number of gold medals at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. But its prowess at soccer is lamentable. China is ranked 84th in soccer's world standings, just ahead of Mozambique.
The Chinese are huge soccer fans, and hundreds of millions are expected to tune in to the World Cup, with all the matches broadcast live here on free television. Sports bars will be packed. But the Chinese won't have their own team to root for. To add to the insult, even China's neighbour, hermetic North Korea, has earned a trip to the World Cup this year.
Since China emerged from the Cultural Revolution and ended its international isolation in the late 1970s, its national team has managed only one World Cup appearance in 2002, and it failed to score a goal in three games. As the men's national team continues to struggle, the Chinese women's team, dubbed "The Iron Roses," ranks amongst the top 10 in the world. Many Chinese fans find this sorry state of men's soccer particularly painful since China has a reasonable claim to have invented the game (along with gunpowder, printing and arguably spaghetti as well). Images from the Han Dynasty, before 220 B.C. show a game similar to soccer being played with a leather ball filled with hair.
As in industry, the government picks national "winners" in sports and funnels cash to create champions to win medals. But the support typically goes to individual sports like gymnastics, swimming and diving, and to sports in which Chinese have traditionally excelled, like badminton and table tennis. Soccer teams here are left to look for private sponsorship.
Even though China now boasts of wealthy companies and individuals who could sponsor teams, there is little support as long as Chinese teams are perceived as perennial losers. Politics comes into play as concluded by several sports journalists because the sports ministry officials, particularly at the local level, would rather invest government money into promising sports prodigies with a quicker guarantee of victory. Soccer in China also has been tainted by widespread corruption. Late last year, the Ministry of Public Security launched a crackdown that so far has led to the arrests of about 20 soccer officials, referees and players accused of match-fixing, throwing games and gambling.
Few Chinese children are playing soccer, which some sports journalists and fans attribute partly to schools de-emphasizing sports in general and partly to the lack of playing fields in the country's dense urban areas. For young people, soccer has largely been eclipsed by basketball, thanks in part to Chinese players in the NBA who are treated like rock stars here, most famously Houston's Yao Ming and New Jersey's Yi Jianlian. Journalists and fans said the NBA's aggressive campaign of marketing and merchandise in China has helped swell the popularity of basketball. By comparison, they noted that international soccer does not even have an office in China.
Rowan Simons, a Briton who came to China more than two decades ago and discovered that he wasn't able to play weekend soccer, has been on a campaign to popularize the sport there. He is now the chairman of China Club Football, the country's first amateur joint-venture football club.
Simons, who has written a book called "Bamboo Goalposts" about his experiences, said the main problem is that soccer elsewhere has traditionally started as a series of neighbourhood clubs, but in China, the ruling Communist authorities have always frowned on home-grown organizations that the party does not directly control. One can only hope that with the passage of time, this giant of a country can too find a place in the lives of football lovers all over the globe.
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