China's drive to reform the beautiful game is riddled with scandal, debt, and disregard for fans
After a four-hour train journey, three buses, and a five-kilometer ride on a rented bicycle, Hu Guofeng (pseudonym) had finally reached his destination. Deep in the Jiangsu countryside, flanked by mountains at the end of a dusty dirt road, a gleaming new sports stadium protruded from the earth like a metallic alien spacecraft in the dusty landscape.
Hu’s surprise at finding this state-of-the-art stadium in what seemed to be “the middle of nowhere” was only mirrored by the shock of the group of young players he’d come to see—the reserve team for Tianjin Teda Football Club, who had not expected this lone fan to show up in the vast stadium to see them play Shanghai Shenhua FC. “Back then, I was a one-man army,” he reminisces to TWOC.
A fan of the Tianjin team since 2010 and a member of the club’s “ultra fan” group association, Hu regularly traveled alone to support the players. “It felt like my team was down to earth, when you chanted the players could hear you and before the game the players could talk to you…I felt like I supported a team that really cared about its fans.”
But that was back in 2018, already a decade beyond the real glory days for Chinese football fans. After years of frustration with the management of the football club, Hu is now questioning the point of supporting the team: “Ever since money poured into the league, Tianjin isn’t so competitive anymore…and because the club is owned by a state-owned company, they don’t need fans to keep the club running. They don’t care about us.”
Hu’s journey from avid fan to frustrated onlooker is emblematic of the trajectory professional Chinese football has taken over the last decade. While vast sums of money have flowed into football clubs and government officials have lined up to back plans to make China a proud football nation, a lack of oversight, unsustainable business models, poor communication with fans, and constantly shifting regulations mean Chinese football has lost its soul, according to Hu.
In some ways, football has never been more popular in China. Before the pandemic, attendance at matches in the Chinese Super League (China’s top division) was the fifth highest in the world, and TV rights to stream matches boomed to 1.3 billion USD between 2016 to 2021, over 14 times their yearly value back in 2015.
Foul Play: Why Chinese Football is Built on Shaky Ground is a story from our issue, “Call of the Wild.” To read the entire issue, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine.
Sam Davies is the managing editor at The World of Chinese. He writes mainly about Chinese society, especially life outside the biggest cities. His pieces touching on diverse topics from the future of China’s ski industry to efforts to prevent juvenile crime.
