China looks to revive ´beautiful game´

Football is “the beautiful game” in most of the world but in China it is downright ugly.

Gambling, match-fixing, crooked referees and poor performances by the national team have made the sport the laughing stock of increasingly indifferent fans and a matter of mounting state concern.

The government in 2006 launched a probe into corruption blighting football which has reached the top echelons of the game, leading to the downfall of the head of the Chinese Football Association (CFA).

In a speech on Tuesday Sports Minister Liu Peng lamented the state of the game in the world’s most populous nation and said the deep-seated problems were stopping China becoming a major football powerhouse.

“Our football level is low. Fraud, gambling, crooked referees and other odious influences keep cropping up,” he said.

Liu’s comments, posted on the official www.sports.cn website, came just days after CFA head Nan Yong and vice head Yang Yimin were taken into police custody for questioning.

The association announced last week that they had been sacked and on Wednesday state press said the pair had been detained.

The far-reaching probe into corruption allegations has led to the arrest of at least 21 professional club managers and sports officials, and the detention of more than 100 others, earlier state press reports said.

Liu said the tough actions of the task force — uniting the police, judiciary, the central bank and the state tax administration — had restored hope for the future of the game.

“It is just because the public security bureau has forcefully intervened that we have made a large step forward in removing the cancer in football,” Liu said.

Chinese fans are not fooled by the state of the game and sports-related web blogs are regularly full of invective on the opportunities squandered.

“China has many talented players, enthusiastic fans, and a vast football market… but the Chinese Football Association’s arrogance, corruption, incompetence have undercut all of this,” said one entry posted Wednesday on popular website Sohu.com.

One irate fan on Baidu.com said: “Investigate, arrest, sentence, and kill those who deserve it! In fact, you might as well shut down the whole league. That would be even better.”

According to Li Chengpeng, author of the new book “Inside China Football,” power, money and prestige in the multi-billion-dollar industry have largely ruined the government-backed effort to develop the professional game.

“The over-concentration of power in the hands of a few is the root of the corruption,” Li, a 41-year-old sports journalist and writer, told AFP.

The top-down nature of the system has led to the widespread practice of players paying agents to pay coaches and club officials for playing time, not only on club teams but also for the national side, he explained.

“When a club orders the team to throw a match, the team has to throw the match,” he said. “If you want to win a championship, you have to pay.”

On Wednesday, the chairman of the board of Beijing Guoan — who won their first China Super League title last year — denied reports that the team had bribed CFA head Nan to pay off referees to secure the championship.

Li said individual players were also taking bribes from gambling syndicates to fix matches in an effort to recoup the money they paid to get the chance to play in the first place in a vicious circle.

Such behaviour has corrupted the national side, he said, which failed to make an impression in qualifying for this year’s World Cup and lost miserably at the Beijing Olympics, although they have qualified for the 2011 Asian Cup.

Li said it was unlikely that corruption will be rooted out unless widespread changes are made in how the sport is administered but is not optimistic, saying the “traditional (bureaucratic) powers are still too strong.”

And he said despite medals success at the Beijing Olympics, China did not understand the “spirit of sports,” becoming too involved in “personal relationships, commerce and politics.”

New CFA boss Wei Di is under no illusions about the scale of the task in front of him, saying he felt great responsibility for the “arduous mission” ahead, and acknowledging both the severe problems plaguing the sport and the poor performances of the national side.

“We must make league matches healthy, standardised and orderly to make fans want to come back to the stadium,” he said.