Chinese soccer caught in quicksand of puny league

• Source: Global Times
• [08:32 January 28 2011]
• Comments

Illustration: Liu Rui

By Liu Xiaocong

The soccer fans of the world can be split into two groups. There are those who like to watch only the top leagues and the international matches, and who scorn lesser games. The second will watch anything, from Romanian women's leagues to top-flight Premiership teams.

But in China, there's a third group. They want to watch top soccer, but they still subject themselves to viewing games by the Chinese men's team. They only like good soccer, so watching performances like the Chinese one in the recent Asian Cup games is a form of patriotic masochism for them.

The Chinese team's head coach Gao Hongbo was shouting out loudly "Why?" when he was sent off by the referee in the final round of group stage match against Uzbekistan for repeated challenges and kicking over a water bottle.

At the same time, there is also a question in every Chinese spectator's head. Our squad did quite well and got a draw in the final game against the seeded team Uzbekistan, who beat them 3:0 three years ago, yet it was defeated a couple of days ago by a less competitive team, Qatar.

Are we making progress or slipping backward? 

Sadly, the answer is the second. The Asian Cup is an ideal arena to measure each team's level of play. We made four points from three matches: a draw, a loss, and a win. Some joke that the win rate of our squad is 33.33 percent, an indication that we are definitely a third level team. A core player of Uzbekistan bluntly pointed out that the Chinese squad is worse than it was four years ago.

The Chinese team made it to the World Cup finals in 2002, even if this was largely thanks to the automatic places for Korea and Japan. We took silver at the Asian Cup in 2004. But at the 2007 and 2011 Asian Cups, we were eliminated at the group stage. The team seems to be getting worse, if anything.

The team has been slammed from every angle: the tactics of the head coach, a lack of practice, an immature squad, or an inadequately aggressive approach on the pitch.

But these can all be traced back to our underdeveloped national league.

We've been lagging behind from the start. Benefitting from the healthy development of the J. League and K. League, Japan and Korea dominated the early championships of the Asian Champion League. After we followed their successful model and build our own professional league, we forgot to establish an efficient operational mechanism.

The recent scandals involving many Chinese top soccer officials reveal that professionalism is a distant dream. The leagues of Japan, Korea, and Iran take the first three places in Asia by rating at 27th, 29th and 31st in the world, which is very consistent with the ranking of their national squads.

Both China's national squad and league rank 84th in the world, and its league ranks 17th among Asian leagues.

Therefore, we should be quite delighted that our team has entered the final 16 in the ongoing Asia Cup. Given how terrible our league is, they were fighting above their weight.

What's more embarrassing is that countries that were once on our level like Qatar and Iraq have surpassed us by hosting the 2022 World Cup and winning the last Asia Cup.

We tried to send kids to Brazil to learn their advanced football techniques. But the young players still had to come back and play in the Chinese league, a poisonous environment that undid any good effects Brazil might have had.

Compared to our short-sighted approach, other countries like Japan and Korea have already sent their high-end products to the top leagues. Shinji Kagawa, Keisuke Honda and Park Ji-sung's performance in the European top leagues have both showed their outstanding ability and the quality of their home countries' leagues that they originally come from.

In this Asian Cup, those players are functioned as a decisive role in their national squads. Unless we build a proper local league and are willing to send our best talent overseas, China will never be a soccer superpower.

The author is a Nanjing-based broadcast journalist. lxchong@hotmail.com