How China’s World Cup dream unraveled – and how it’s slowly growing again
By Reagan Yip, CNN
(CNN) — As the World Cup grips North America this summer, China will again watch from the sidelines.
But an unlikely story is bubbling up in the nation as Chinese fans cheer on unlikely amateur soccer players – from delivery drivers to villagers – now playing in packed stadiums back home in a rare sign, some believe, that the Beautiful Game may finally be taking root in the nation.
For years, qualifying for soccer’s most prestigious competition has been a national goal for the world’s second-largest economy. It’s one of the “three wishes” President Xi Jinping once famously set out for the sport, alongside hosting and ultimately winning the tournament.
In April 2016, the Chinese Football Association unveiled a landmark blueprint for global dominance by mid-century. Among the sweeping targets: 70,000 pitches nationwide and 30 million schoolchildren taking up the game by 2020.
But a decade on, the results are thin.
The men’s team has slipped from 82nd in the world in 2016 to 94th out of 211 national teams. Even with the World Cup expanding from 32 to 48 sides, China’s hopes were shattered after a crushing 1-0 defeat to Indonesia last June. Its 2002 debut, which ended in a goalless group-stage exit, remains the country’s only appearance.
Can soccer culture be manufactured at all? In China, the attempt to do so has run up against forces far beyond the pitch.
Scoring political points
It was late November 2012 and Xi had taken the party’s helm just two weeks earlier. Touring an exhibition, he uttered two words that would come to define modern China: the “Chinese dream.” It was a vision of national “rejuvenation.” The phrase soon became a centerpiece of official rhetoric.
Soccer was no exception. The landmark 2016 blueprint pledged not only sporting successes, but also a dream to “rejuvenate the nation.”
What followed was a splurge on foreign stars in the Chinese Super League (CSL). Between 2015 and 2017, CSL clubs spent $1.12 billion in the transfer market, racking up a net deficit of more than $818 million, Transfermarkt figures show. At the start of 2016, the domestic transfer record was broken four times in a single month, as well-known players including Oscar, Paulinho, Carlos Tévez and Hulk swapped Europe for China.
Bankrolling the boom were predominantly real-estate developers; by 2018, owners of all 16 top-flight clubs had stakes in the property market.
“It was never about football. It was always about establishing a closer relationship with the local government,” Dr. Tobias Ross – who interviewed 200 insiders in China’s soccer scene for a new book he co-authored, “Football, Business and State Power in Contemporary China” – tells CNN Sports.
This back-scratching reflected guanxi and renqing, informal networks of relationships built on favors and obligations in Chinese culture. For property conglomerates, those ties unlocked two prized state-controlled resources: land and bank loans. Officials, unable to run clubs themselves, sought prestige and promotion in return, he says.
The dynamic fueled lavish spending on high-profile signings and flashy stadium projects that “look really great on paper.”
Its economics rarely made sense, though, with Ross saying, “it’s basically a loss-making business.” Two-time Asian champion and eight-time CSL winner Guangzhou Evergrande, for example, was losing between $155 million and $310 million a year, Bloomberg reported in 2021.
Investors nonetheless went to great lengths to preserve those hard-earned ties, by trailing local party chiefs and relocating clubs when officials were transferred to other cities, Ross says. As clubs climbed divisions, owners also tried to extend their influence “up the guanxi ladder” toward higher levels of government.
But the model wasn’t built to last. Money often dried up once investors secured or completed their projects, while officials prioritized short-term achievements during their limited tenures. “Honestly, it’s a joke,” says Ross, noting that even top CSL clubs made little effort to grow merchandising, media rights or other revenue streams, unlike their European counterparts.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic proved the final blow. It wiped out the financial cushion that had long propped up club spending. Beijing’s sprawling crackdown on soaring debt levels and oversupply in the property sector hit owners brutally. Cash-strapped clubs at times struggled to pay utilities, never mind players’ lucrative wages. More than 40 teams have folded since 2021.
And the blurred line between guanxi and outright illegality bred widespread graft. Serving a 14-year sentence, former Chinese Football Association deputy chief Du Zhaocai told state broadcaster CCTV in a 2024 documentary: “Money and gifts are often used to ease official processes, to the point that it has become an entrenched informal practice.”
In another shocking revelation, former Everton midfielder Li Tie admitted paying rival teams to help two clubs win promotion to the Chinese Super League during managerial spells between 2015 and 2019. He later paid $440,000 to become national team head coach. Only last month, the association added a further 17 people to its lifetime ban list for match-fixing and gambling.
A stagnating economy, demographic decline, and intensifying US-China competition in technology, among others, have also pushed the sport further down the government’s policy agenda.
“Football is no longer featured on a central political level. It’s not part of the five-year plan, Xi’s not openly speaking about it,” Ross says. “And especially now after Covid, local governments don’t have the funds. They need them for more pressing issues.”
As the gold rush ended and political incentives faded, it laid bare deeper structural cracks – ones that money alone could not fix.
Engineering a culture
For all the pitches Beijing pledged to build – and did – there may simply not be a soccer tradition to fill them. Few know that better than Rowan Simons, a Brit who moved to China to study its language in the 1980s and later emerged as a prominent commentator.
“I discovered China had no football clubs at the time. Everything was government organized,” Simons tells CNN Sports of his search for a team to join back then. “I found that quite strange. Football is a culture. It’s organized at the grassroots level through clubs, which are social clubs in effect.”
In Britain, he emphasizes, amateur clubs are built on volunteers – maintaining pitches, running bars, even driving buses – with “community values built into football from the very beginning.” China will only stand a chance at the World Cup, he argues, if it builds the game from the bottom up.
The logic is straightforward: The more people who play, the more non-professional clubs there are, and the greater the chances of identifying and nurturing local talent. Many Chinese fans, he says, watch European giants like Liverpool and Arsenal without realizing those clubs also began as amateur teams more than a century ago.
With that in mind, Simons founded China’s second registered foreign-invested soccer club in 2001, seven years after the country launched its first professional league from scratch.
Today, China has about 980,000 registered players and 40,000 teams at the grassroots level. England, with a population roughly 4.2% that of the Asian nation, has more registered players and three times as many teams. An official report last December found soccer wasn’t among China’s six most popular sports, coming behind activities like badminton and cycling.
As Simons’ club introduced thousands of pupils to the sport over the years, he saw other headwinds pulling the game back.
Chief among them is what Simons and Ross call “the cliff” – the point at which students abandon sports altogether as they gear up for China’s grueling college entrance exam, dubbed by state media as “the world’s toughest.”
“Kids are starting to play, and much more at primary school… But when it comes to middle school, the academic pressure is on, and many parents feel that they can’t afford the time for their kids to play anymore,” Simons says, adding that there is a “very significant” dropout rate among 12-year-olds at his club.
Indeed, pupils are over-worked and over-tested, with many funneled into private tutoring after school and during holidays. The pressure became so intense that Beijing had to move to clamp down on the sector, only for it to resurface underground.
“In football, there needs to be a much greater emphasis on human competence and human capacity development. And perhaps that means being individually creative in the same way as Messi and Ronaldo have been,” Simon Chadwick, Professor of Afro-Eurasian Sport at France’s Emlyon Business School, tells CNN Sports. “But I don’t think Chinese society necessarily encourages that.”
Aspects of Chinese social and communal life, Chadwick says, can be highly structured and collective, with routines often shared across family, school and work contexts. This leaves little room for the spontaneity that helps talents emerge and playground soccer thrive, he argues.
On the other hand, the centralized model has actually helped turn the country into a sporting powerhouse, cultivating athletes like superstar hurdler Liu Xiang and badminton great Lin Dan. At the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, China finished second on the medal table, just behind the US. But soccer, as Chadwick puts it, is a “very arrogant” sport. It requires another mindset and, above all, time for a culture to take root.
“The Chinese sports system has always been oriented more towards Olympic-type sports and the metric of success has always been very clear,” he adds. “But winning the 100 meters or winning 110-meter hurdles is actually very different to creating a squad of 22 players that goes to a tournament for one month and has to beat the best in the world.”
Flickers of hope
Impassioned banter only locals would understand, nail-biting penalty shootouts, bicycle kicks and trick shots, a packed stadium of more than 62,000 fans watching a final – all in a season that racked up 2.2 billion views on livestreams.
Yet this is not the CSL, nor are these professional players. It is a viral amateur league in the Jiangsu province, known locally as Suchao, featuring teachers, coders, delivery drivers and students. Thirteen cities each field a team to compete in the seven-month tournament featuring 85 matches where Taizhou was eventually crowned champion last November in the inaugural season.
Inspired by a wild village league where livestock are awarded as prizes, Suchao has become so popular that other provinces are now replicating its model. While tickets cost no more than $3, the league has helped generate $2.2 billion in consumer spending from travel and hospitality to local businesses.
For soccer, though, it is a revival of the country’s dream and enthusiasm that matters. Taizhou supporter Cai Liang told Reuters he had been unsure of whether to encourage his son to pursue the sport. But after watching a match and getting more interested, his 14-year-old son said: “I’d play football more often.”
In fact, parents may prove key to its future. Former Manchester City’s Sun Jihai made history in 2002 as the first East Asian player to score in England’s Premier League and represented China at its only World Cup appearance that year. Speaking to CNN Sports, he says parental attitudes have certainly had an impact on the country’s talent pipeline.
Even during his playing career, Sun says he already hoped to devote himself to youth training after retirement, calling it “the most direct and quickest way to fix Chinese football.”
In 2024, he spearheaded an initiative aimed at identifying outstanding young players across the country and offering them fully-funded places in his training camp. Of the more than 10,000 who have taken part in tryouts so far, about 90 have made the cut, he says.
The program has organized trials in less-developed areas and places heavy emphasis on academic results alongside soccer, hiring teachers to help students with homework after school. “I am a parent too,” Sun says, arguing for efforts to break down income and social barriers and widen access.
Also describing parents as “the main hope,” Simons says more are beginning to see sports not as a distraction from education, but part of it by fostering fitness, friendships and wider social skills. He recalls visiting a training session at his club where he feared something had gone wrong when he saw parents on the sidelines in tears. Instead, they told him: “We have never seen our son be so happy.”
With more pitches and opportunities to play, gifted teenagers are beginning to make their mark. This month, four Suchao players were called up to the under-19 team.
Elsewhere, there are promising signs: China progressed to the AFC U-23 Asian Cup final for the first time last January, losing only to regional power Japan, while registered grassroots players have nearly doubled in the past year. More pitches across communities are giving a new generation a taste of the Beautiful Game.
As Suchao’s new season rolls on while the World Cup unfolds afar, whether it is a one-time wonder remains to be seen. But beyond the doom and gloom, China’s soccer future may no longer depend solely on top-down ambition.
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