Xi Jinping had a dream, though it is safe to assume it was not this.
Back in 2011, around a year before he took over as paramount leader of China, Xi had spoken of revolutionising football in China. His three-stage plan was initially aimed towards qualifying for the men’s World Cup while establishing thousands of specialist schools to build future generations of technically proficient soccer obsessives.
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Stages two and three involved hosting, and then winning, the tournament. The “Football Reform and Development Programme”, adopted in 2016, made it all sound pretty straightforward. The People’s Republic would become a footballing powerhouse by 2050.
Perhaps that will still come to pass. There is time to play with, after all, and ambitions remain to stage the World Cup in 2030 or, at a push, 2034. But those charged with implementing the president’s grand plan would have hoped for more evidence of progress by now. Instead, when it comes to the men’s game, China’s status feels as peripheral as ever.
Xi was on the Arabian Peninsula last week, but his visit to Riyadh, only his third trip abroad since the outbreak of the pandemic, was a diplomatic mission. The agenda comprised a summit with Arab leaders, a meeting with the six-nation Gulf Arab alliance and direct talks with the Saudis aimed at strengthening economic and strategic ties, particularly over energy. There was no reason to take in a game in nearby Qatar.
China’s team have been conspicuous only by their absence at FIFA’s jamboree, having succumbed at the third stage of Asian qualifying earlier in the year. There were chastening defeats to Oman and bottom-placed Vietnam, as well as all the teams who finished above them, and a solitary victory in the 10-game campaign. They finished second bottom in the six-team section and are ranked a lowly 79 in the world.
Instead, they have been forced to watch as regional rivals such as Japan and South Korea have reached the knockout stage – the former taking two notable European scalps along the way, in Germany and Spain – while unfancied sides such as Morocco and Iran have performed above expectations. For Beijing, the experience must have been excruciating.
Then again, given their only appearance at the finals in 12 attempts to qualify remains their participation in 2002 — when Bora Milutinovic’s side travelled to South Korea and Japan with high hopes only to succumb to Costa Rica, Brazil and Turkey in the group stage without scoring a goal — they have grown used to life on the outside looking in. Given North Korea have been to two World Cups, it is a chastening position for a country with designs of global domination.
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At best, World Cups tend to end up as expressions of Chinese soft power, with sponsorship deals off the pitch delivering some sort of presence on this grandest of stages. Yet, over the last few weeks, this tournament has still found a new way to hurt them politically.
Cases of COVID-19 are on the rise across China, a country that previously prided itself on a “zero COVID” policy. Large gatherings remain limited, with cities regularly thrust into lockdown overnight. Testing is mandatory, there are travel restrictions and mask usage is obligatory in public.
The restrictions have prompted rare outbursts of civil unrest across the country of late — from Guangzhou to Beijing, Zhengzhou to Shanghai — apparently sparked by a deadly fire in the western Xinjiang region and invariably accompanied by chants of “end the lockdown”. The death toll of 10 in the blaze at the apartment block in the city of Urumqi was blamed on COVID-19 restrictions.
For those living in lockdown and tuning in to the state-owned Central China TV (CCTV) coverage of the football, the sight of maskless fans in heavily populated stadiums across Qatar has been galling. Their sense of isolation has been made all the more acute.
“It’s more symbolic than anything else,” says Mark Dreyer, a Chinese sports industry observer based in Beijing. “Does seeing someone on television having a good time piss you off? Probably not. But people in China are basically at the end of their tether. Maybe seeing others having a good time with no obvious COVID restrictions is a trigger. You just don’t need the constant reminders that, elsewhere, life appears to be going on as normal.”
Sporting events have largely been held behind closed doors in China since the initial outbreak of the virus almost three years ago. The Beijing Winter Olympics was staged without spectators. Dreyer points to one table tennis tournament, and another badminton event, that were also staged in bubbles.
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The East Asian championship was switched to Japan in April, while September’s Asian Games, due to be held in Hangzhou, was postponed until 2023. The Chinese Super League — which supplied just two players at the World Cup — went through two years with its football fixtures played exclusively at a few designated locations, again in COVID-19 bio-secure bubbles. It remains, for the large part, a fan-free event even now and a competition in decline.
In May, the country handed back the rights to host the 2023 Asian Cup — Asia’s premier international football tournament. That event was to be held in 10 cities from June 16 to July 16, with 24 national teams from across the continent taking part. It will now be held in Qatar.
“That tournament would have been huge, the equivalent of the Euros or the Copa America,” says Dreyer. “They’re showing the basic minimum of European football because they don’t want to illustrate how the rest of the world is back to normal and, in China, they’re still playing in these bubbles with no fans three years into the pandemic.”
That political concern appeared to have influenced some of the CCTV coverage from Qatar earlier in the tournament, with suggestions the state broadcaster had manipulated broadcasts to avoid carrying crowd shots from apparently full stadia.
Chinese state television is notoriously cautious of crowd shots at international sporting events, fearful as it is of what might be displayed in the stands. It has been scarred by previous incidents, such as the 2004 Super Bowl when a half-time montage included an image of “Tank Man”, an unidentified person standing in front of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square during the 1989 pro-democracy protests. Tibetan flags are also an issue. As a result, it tends to broadcast with a 30-second delay.
Social media users over the last month pointed out subtle discrepancies between CCTV’s coverage of matches in Qatar and the feed available via international providers.
Footage from Australia’s group game against Tunisia, shared on Weibo, suggested CCTV would cut to players, coaches or long-distance shots while the international feed was showing unmasked faces in the stands. Dreyer pointed out a similar issue during Canada’s game against Croatia, not least when images of the crowd were replaced by a close up of the Canada coach, John Herdman, in his technical area. While shots of the crowd were never entirely absent from CCTV’s coverage, the differences were notable at times. Conspiracy theories duly abounded.
Some people still refusing to see this, so decided to track it. Within a minute, there was this: close-up shots of Canadian and Croatian fans on BBC/international feed, replaced by a solo shot of Canadian coach John Herdman on CCTV. pic.twitter.com/V3DZRjHrzk
— Mark Dreyer (@DreyerChina) November 27, 2022
“They’ve started putting most of the fan shots back in on CCTV because it had become such a big story,” adds Dreyer. “It’s almost as if they were, like, ‘Oh dear, we’ve been caught. We’re going to have to pretend we weren’t doing it’. But it’s so pointless anyway. Fan shots or not, you can still see there are 50,000 people in the stadiums. People here have already made the connection that life elsewhere is back to normal.”
The reality is that, though Chinese on-field participation is still such a rarity, the World Cup remains hugely popular.
Kick-off times for matches in Qatar have been unkind, with most of the critical knockout games starting at 3am on China’s eastern seaboard. For those who opt against watching matches live in the small hours of the morning, CCTV has been playing re-runs in their entirety from 8am, with the broadcaster claiming strong viewing figures for games across its television and mobile platforms.
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Last month’s opening ceremony attracted 27.5million unique viewers according to figures published by CSM Media. The fixture that followed, Qatar’s rather tame defeat by Ecuador, was shown on four national and as many local channels in China and attracted 24.1million unique viewers, despite kicking off at midnight.
There have been a few bars showing matches in select cities, but the fact so many are locked down, and public gatherings generally discouraged, has left most watching the tournament from home.
“If this was a summer World Cup under normal non-COVID circumstances, the beer gardens would be full and there would be a real buzz in the streets,” says Dreyer, author of Sporting Superpower: An Insider’s View on China’s Quest to be the Best. “There is a real passion for the game here, and a knowledgeable fanbase. The Chinese are not shy about adopting a country or player to follow, either.
“They’re used to not having a horse in the race, so that’s how football ‘support’ has evolved here.”
Theirs would normally be a huge supporter presence at the finals themselves. FIFA sold 40,000 tickets to Chinese fans for the tournament four years ago, with local media in Russia subsequently reporting than closer to 100,000 visitors from China had attended the finals. This time around, FIFA sold between 5,000 and 7,000 tickets to Chinese nationals before Qatar 2022. COVID-19 travel restrictions, with limited flights to and from Doha and the threat of onerous quarantines upon return, may have ensured rather fewer have actually been at the event.
Two who definitely did travel were a pair of pandas awarded to Qatar just before the tournament. Jing Jing and Si Hai (since renamed Suhail and Soraya) took up residence in Doha’s Panda House just four days before the first fixture. Qatar is the first Middle Eastern nation to receive such a gift from China, with their arrival generating a rush of local publicity and held up as evidence of the strength of the bond between the two countries.
But with no team to draw the focus, China has been left clinging to what other involvement they can find as consolation. FIFA allocated a refereeing team from China to the finals, though Ma Ning was limited to a role as fourth official at six group games. CCTV was keen to point out that there were Chinese flag-bearers at the opening ceremony. All of which feels rather inadequate.
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Instead, once again, China’s presence at the World Cup has been restricted to influence off the pitch.
They have played a significant role in building the infrastructure in Qatar. The Lusail Stadium, the stage for the final between France and Argentina, was constructed at a reported cost of $767million (£630m) by China Railway Construction Corporation in partnership with Qatar’s HBK building group. Zhou Jian, China’s ambassador to Qatar, described the stadium as “an iconic project demonstrating Chinese contribution to the World Cup”. The arena’s image adorns the new 10-riyal banknote.
Around 2,500 air conditioning units installed at 100 security checkpoints at seven of the World Cup venues have been supplied by Midea Group, specialists in home appliances in China, and 1,500 shuttle buses — 888 of them electric — in use at the tournament have been provided by Yutong, a leading Chinese bus manufacturer that is planning to open a factory in Qatar to make vehicles tailored to the local market.
Chinese companies have provided the container houses at fan villages and the Power Construction Corporation of China designed and built the Al Kharsaah solar power station, which opened in October. Their influence is strong within the basic organisational structures and facilities in Qatar.
If that has helped establish a foothold in the region, then China had already made its in-roads with FIFA. The organisers’ official souvenirs and assorted tat — more than 200 products ranging from flags and t-shirts to bags, cups, miniature trophies and commemorative balls — have been overwhelmingly been “made in China”, with many originating in the factories of Dongguan, in Guangdong province.
The Chinese can even lay some claim to the mascot, La’eeb (‘super skilled player’ in Arabic), with the contract to mass produce the character’s array of mementos, from key rings to replicas, having been landed by Cheche Cultural Development, another company based in the south-eastern city of Dongguan.
More high-profile are the Chinese sponsors so closely associated with the tournament. Many had moved in to fill the void when Western companies withdrew financial support amid the scandals that engulfed FIFA’s previous regime in the middle of the last decade. Those legacy deals remain, with others having since joined the party.
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Wanda Group is still one of FIFA’s seven commercial partners, part of a deal that will extend through to the 2030 World Cup. The six-year sponsorship deal with Vivo, the official smartphone of the tournament, runs until 2023. “Those were multi-tournament deals,” says Dreyer. “Many were struck during China’s boom period, when it came to football, and mask the fact that, for example, while Wanda was a major player, it may now be past its peak.
“Generally there are two reasons for a Chinese company to sponsor a major international sporting event. One is to push their consumer electronics as they seek to break into foreign markets — we’ve seen that with Vivo, Huawei and, now, Hisense. Then you have brands seeking prestige back in China, like Mengniu Dairy. ‘Look at us, we’re a World Cup sponsor and Luis Figo drinks our milk’. That is all for show for the domestic Chinese market.
“There may be a little bit of pride at seeing the names of Chinese companies flashing up on the billboards around the pitch, but your average fan doesn’t really care. Chinese state media have been playing this influence up, but it’s all a distraction from the question, ‘Why aren’t we actually competing on the field at the World Cup?’.
“The reality is China are still a long, long way from competing. They’ve got a much better chance of reaching the next World Cup because the competition expands to 48 teams but, even then, it’s still probably only 50-50. They are lost in this constant desire to come up with grand schemes and 20-year plans aimed at progressing — like the technical schools to develop their own talent — but they can never stick at it for longer than three or four years before the impatience kicks in. ‘Why haven’t we won the World Cup yet? We must be doing it wrong…’. So they rip it up and start again.
“China is essentially a top down country. Everything comes down from the No 1 man at the top. When it comes to football, though, you need grassroots in place. You need that pyramid and to build up from the bottom. China doesn’t have that at all. The domestic game here was on a bad trajectory before COVID. Things have worsened since then.”
The soft power counts for something, but it is not enough. China has spent the last month on the outside looking in while struggling to explain how the rest of the world appears to be released from lockdown and able to celebrate en masse.
One suspects the end of the tournament cannot come soon enough.
(Top photo design: Samuel Richardson)