Why the World Cup Keeps Eluding China

This week, as the FIFA World Cup heats up in North America, we explore the state of Chinese soccer and why—despite repeated attempts at reform—it hasn’t found success on the global stage.

China’s Failed Soccer Ambitions

Chinese fans are once again lamenting the absence of their national team from the World Cup. The disappointment is particularly acute because this year’s tournament expanded from 32 to 48 teams, including a record nine from the Asian Football Confederation, in which the Chinese team competes.

China has reached the World Cup only once, in 2002, when it was eliminated from the group stage without scoring a goal. Though Chinese fans are used to seeing regional rivals Japan and South Korea easily qualify for the tournament, losing out to newcomers such as Jordan and Uzbekistan is harder to swallow.

The consistent underperformance of the Chinese men’s national team is somewhat puzzling. Soccer enjoys immense popularity in China, and the Chinese Super League is one of the world’s best-attended. Meanwhile, the Chinese women’s national team—the Steel Roses—has appeared in every FIFA Women’s World Cup since 1991, save for 2011.

There is no shortage of explanations for this dynamic. Analysts have singled out China’s intense academic pressures and lack of youth soccer opportunities, as well as rampant corruption and abuse in the country’s top-down sporting system.

What I find interesting is not simply the existence of these problems but China’s inability to solve them. Soccer is a personal priority of Chinese President Xi Jinping, a longtime fan of the sport. In 2011, before becoming president, Xi expressed three wishes for Chinese soccer: to qualify for the World Cup, host the World Cup, and win the World Cup.

Fifteen years later, China is no closer to those goals, despite billions of dollars in investment; repeated anti-corruption campaigns; and a massive, state-backed push to turn China into a “first-class soccer superpower” by 2050.

Part of the problem is that the Chinese domestic league is large and lucrative enough to keep talented players from seeking opportunities abroad, but it is so rife with incompetence and corruption that this talent often goes to waste.

Not a single player on the current Chinese national team plays for a foreign club; by contrast, only eight members of the U.S. squad play for Major League Soccer, the relatively weak U.S. league with several Canadian teams. Chinese players often go abroad during their youth careers but rarely stay overseas at the senior level.

Instead of bringing back valuable competitive experience to grow the game at home, many Chinese players spend their careers trapped in a system of collapsing teams, incompetent coaches, unpaid wages, and pay-to-play scandals.

China also can’t easily replicate the model used by Qatar, for instance—which is to say, give a bunch of foreign players Chinese citizenship and buy its way to a half-decent team. Chinese soccer continues to struggle with racism and ethnic nationalism, creating a hostile environment for players who are not ethnically Chinese.

The biggest problem, however, remains corruption. In January, Chinese authorities announced sweeping punishments for match-fixing and other forms of bribery, handing lifetime bans to 73 players and officials. Several were already serving prison sentences, including Li Tie, a former national team coach and onetime star player.

Many officials punished this time rose to power after earlier waves of arrests removed their predecessors. Before Xi took office, Chinese soccer was rocked by a major match-fixing scandal and a yearslong investigation that resulted in prison sentences for senior officials, the stripping of league titles, and reforms that ultimately failed to eliminate corruption from the sport.

Ironically, Xi’s enthusiasm for soccer may have contributed to the problem. A familiar pattern has played out across multiple sectors, from the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force to the state-backed “Big Fund” to promote semiconductor development. Once an area becomes a national priority, the money flowing into it creates powerful incentives for corruption with few institutions capable enough to expose waste or abuse.

Corruption has also made things difficult for the succession of foreign coaches brought in to revive the Chinese national team. They have repeatedly found themselves constrained by entrenched interests and a convoluted sports system where Chinese Communist Party officials have the last say. It is difficult to imagine a foreign coach being granted much autonomy in China.

South Korea, by contrast, gave Dutch manager Guus Hiddink total authority over the national team’s selection, strategy, and training ahead of the 2002 World Cup. Hiddink dismantled long-standing hierarchies—for instance, that older players were considered automatically superior to younger ones—and led the team to a remarkable run to the semifinals that year.

When China made a big Olympic push ahead of hosting the 2008 Games, it benefited from the highly centralized nature of its approach.

Directing young athletes into sports such as target shooting or diving involved little interaction with existing institutions and far less money. Individual sports also demand only a handful of elite competitors capable of winning gold, while building up a soccer culture requires deep and competitive talent pools.

Today, many Chinese soccer fans have pinned their hopes on grassroots village leagues that have surged in popularity in the last two or so years. Perhaps the key to unlocking the country’s major potential will be found there: Among 1.4 billion people, there are probably future stars whose talents haven’t been developed.

But the depressing likelihood is that any grassroots success will eventually be taken over by existing sporting authorities and dragged into the same problems that have long plagued the Chinese game.