I am no such soccer expert, so as an amateur, let me review four points often touted as reasons why soccer has not been as successful in China compared to other countries:
Explanation A. Chinese children cannot practice soccer due to lack of money for balls and restricted space in crowded urban centers. Good point if you have tried to walk quickly through Shanghai malls. Yet I have seen Brazilian children practice soccer with a can wrapped in rags in streets filled with parked cars, and the Japanese and Dutch live in very crowded urban areas. In his autobiography, the Brazilian legend Pele recalled he had no money for a ball and instead he played with a sock stuffed with newspaper. Urban Chinese families now enjoy comfortable apartments, a car and vacations to Macau or Thailand--indeed, among ten middle-class Chinese children there would be at least a dozen soccer balls.
My comment: Explanation A is generally false. (The facilities issue will be treated in-depth in the next post.)
Explanation B. Chinese (Asian) physiques are different, and therefore there won’t be good soccer players. Some insular Americans may have said the same about Chinese in the National Basketball Association... before Yao Ming, the successful center of the Houston Rockets, came along. (The first NBA non-white player was “Wat” Misaka – a Japanese-American from the western U.S. state of Utah, who played with the New York Knicks in the 1947 season.) Of “Asian” physical capabilities vis-à-vis soccer, Sergio Echigo, a son of Japanese immigrants to Brazil, became a star player for the Sao Paulo Corinthians soccer club in the early 1960s. My daughter is taller than the Argentine hero Maradona (1.63 meters, 5 ft 4 in) and the great Pele at 1.73 meters (5 ft 8 in) is shorter than me. About a dozen PRC citizens currently play on European League soccer teams, including Zheng Zi of the English League Celtics and Li Chunyu of the Serbian FK Rad--two excellent, highly competitive Level 1 teams.
My Comment: Explanation B is false.
Explanation C. China has corrupt professional soccer, so this leads to inferior soccer playing. The last statement is half-true: in fall 2009, the Ministry of Public Security arrested more than 20 Chinese soccer officials, referees and players accused of “match-fixing, throwing games and gambling.” (Forbes has written about this, too.) However, in 2005 Brazilian soccer suffered from a major scandal where a referee was banned for life, and several others faced charges of fraud and conspiracy. There are similar allegations (and arrests from time to time) in many countries. Italy has no soccer betting? Nigeria is absolutely clean? Russia? Pick any South or Central American country. The formula Corruption = Bad Soccer does not apply to Brazil, Italy or Argentina nor to any other country.
My comment: Explanation C is false (and don’t bring it up again).
Explanation D. Chinese soccer is managed by the China Football Association (CFA), a non-profit, non-governmental group, but linkages with the General Administration of Sport (a government agency reporting to the top People’s State Council headed by Premier Wen Jiabao; it manages the Chinese Olympics Committee and the All China Sports Federation) are still suspect, and a top-down authoritarian approach to sports curtails the development of soccer. If indeed the Chinese state sports machine totally failed at winning medals at the Olympics, this would be a political-sports linkage issue to investigate further. But North Korea is labeled by the global media as “hermetic”--but nevertheless fielded a strong World Cup team managed by a government hack/soccer genius who probably never left Pyongyang. This faceless individual probably fears for his life if the North Korean team does not succeed. Maybe sometimes the threat of punishment works over monetary incentives.
My comment: Explanation D is interesting, but false.
So I have dismissed four reasons (Chinese bloggers have listed many more, but I wish to move on) why a Chinese soccer team again did not qualify for the World Cup. What would I--a non-soccer playing blogger--recommend for China regarding the future of soccer?
The answer will come in my next post, about grassroots organizations, lessons from Japan and the U.S. (and the NBA and basketball fan growth in China). Success in soccer would also involve issues of corporate sponsorship, PRC citizenship and naturalization, and training, training, training (up to a point). If it adopted those strategies, the People’s Republic of China could transform itself into the global winner of the “beautiful game."