Chinese soccer’s latest anti-corruption purge, explained

According to two separate, one-line statements released on April 28 by China’s General Administration of Sport (GAS), Li and Ma were placed under investigation on suspicion of “serious violations of laws and regulations” by three agencies — the ruling Communist Party’s corruption watchdog, the sports ministry’s anti-graft office, and disciplinary authorities in Hubei province.

In the past six months, nearly a dozen active and retired officials in the Chinese soccer sector have been caught up in the scandal, with the list including Lǐ Tiě 李铁, former head coach of the national men’s soccer team, and Chén Xūyuán 陈戌源, who has been CFA’s president since 2019.

The actual details of what prompted the crackdown are a bit murky, and it’s unclear if more people will get caught up in the scandal, said Mark Dreyer, author of Sporting Superpower: An Insider’s View on China’s Quest to be the Best and the founder of China Sports Insider. (Disclosure: Dreyer also hosted a podcast on our Sinica Network.) But speculation is rife that they were the subjects of criminal investigations due to a variety of malfeasance, which might include embezzlement, bribery, match-fixing, and general abuse of power.

“No one really knows why they are doing this, why football, why now. Was it just football’s turn or was it a distraction from other things?” Dreyer told The China Project. “There’s so little transparency over any of this stuff, which is fairly typical for the way things like this are handled.”

The downfall of a former soccer superstar

The ongoing turmoil started last November when Li Tie abruptly disappeared from the public eye, after decades of being one of the biggest stars in Chinese soccer. Rumors have it that the last public sighting of Li was at a coaching workshop organized by the CFA on November 9, when he was taken away from a hotel and never returned. About two weeks later, Hubei’s anti-graft body released a succinct statement, announcing that an investigation into Li was underway with assistance from top sports officials in the country.

Hailing from the capital city of Shenyang in China’s northeast Liaoning province, Li, 45, was a celebrated athlete during his earlier career as a midfielder in the 2000s, playing for Everton F.C. and Sheffield United in the English Premier League after helping the Chinese national team qualify for the 2002 World Cup, the only time China has participated in the tournament.

Since 2012, Li has taken on coaching roles at several major Chinese soccer clubs, such as the Hubei-based Wuhan Yangtze River — then known as Wuhan Zall — where the former player reportedly fetched a contract worth around 12 million yuan ($1.7 million) in 2017. A year later, Wuhan reached the top flight after a five-year absence.

In January 2020, Li was named China’s head coach, two months after Italian veteran Marcello Lippi resigned following a shock World Cup qualifier defeat. Hoping to keep Li in its orbit, the Wuhan club inked a new deal with the soccer star, where he served as the general manager for an annual salary of 30 million yuan ($4.3 millione).

For a while, the renewed relationship between Li and Wuhan Zall appeared to be amicable. But sources close to the matter revealed that resentment began brewing after the team performed poorly in the Chinese Super League (CSL) in 2020. The animosity increased after Li refused to take a pay cut to ease the financial strains on the club amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, Li suffered a nosedive in reputation when he resigned as the head coach of the national team amid public criticism of his misuse of players during the 2022 World Cup qualifiers.

In 2021, the salary dispute with Wuhan escalated when Li requested the involvement of the CFA, which later punished the club for not paying its players’ salaries in full. Local media reported that in retaliation, Yán Zhì 阎志, CEO of Wuhan-based investment holding company Zall Group and the owner of the club, filed a complaint with China’s sports authorities, who later initiated a probe into Li and suspected him of “serious violations of the law.”

Who else have been accused?

Li’s trouble has snowballed into a full-blown corruption scandal rocking Chinese soccer. In relation to Li, a 2019 CSL match between Shenzhen Kaisa and Wuhan Zall — which ended in a 4-4 draw and saved the Shenzhen team from relegation — came under scrutiny. As a result, five people from Shenzhen Kaisa, including its goalkeeper Zhāng Lù 张鹭 and manager Zhāng Yǒng 张勇, were placed under investigation. Several senior club executives at Hebei F.C., where Li used to coach before joining Wuhan Zall, were also hit with match-fixing allegations.

The crackdown reached new heights earlier this year when Liú Yì 刘奕, the CFA’s former secretary-general, and Chén Yǒngliàng 陈永亮, the serving executive deputy secretary-general of the CFA, became targets in the anti-corruption efforts. Other high-ranking CFA officials that have been taken into custody include the director of its disciplinary committee Wáng Xiǎopíng 王小平, the head of its competition department Huáng Sōng 黄松, and its former vice president Yú Hóngchén 于洪臣.

The most prominent heavyweight to fall from power so far is CFA president Chén Xūyuán 陈戌源, who was elected in 2019 as the organization’s first full-time head in its almost 70-year history and has been photographed on multiple occasions discussing soccer with Chinese president and lifelong soccer fan Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, who has famously set ambitious goals for Chinese soccer.

Chen’s downfall stands in sharp contrast to his outward aversion to corruption and anything money-related. During his tenure at the CFA, Chen spearheaded a “decommercialization” campaign targeting professional soccer clubs, requiring them to slash spending on recruits and banning shareholding companies’ names from appearing in the club titles.

In 2019, when he was president of Shanghai International Port Group, which owns CSL team Shanghai Port (formerly Shanghai SIPG), Chen told players to treat soccer as a “noble sport” and not to be influenced by money. “If you prioritize financial gains above everything else, you won’t have much success in your professional career,” he said. Just weeks before his ousting, Chen gave a speech at an anti-corruption meeting, where he warned CFA officials not to abuse their power for personal interest.

So far, China’s sports ministry hasn’t released any details about alleged offenses. But the string of news has made the current atmosphere in Chinese soccer tense, said Cameron Wilson, a British journalist who has lived in China for almost two decades and the founding editor of Wild East Football.

“In the current climate, any CFA or club official or even player could be implicated,” he told The China Project, pointing to rumors surrounding Zhōu Jūn 周军, the former chief executive of soccer club Shanghai Shenhua, who is abroad right now and reportedly fears returning home. “But as is always the case, the specifics of who did what are clear as mud.”

Another chapter in Chinese soccer’s scandal-ridden history

Illegal activities involving money have long been endemic in Chinese soccer, where common corruption practices include companies bribing referees, club managers embezzling team sponsorship funds, and coaches taking money from players to put them on a team.

Previous attempts to fix the problem all seemed hard-hitting at the time, but ultimately went nowhere. The last time China tried to root out “bad apples” in the rotten world of soccer was in 2009, in a three-year campaign that sent more than 50 high-level soccer figures to jail.

According to Wilson, the scale of the current clampdown is broadly similar to the one in 2009. Back then, CFA chairman Nán Yǒng 南勇 was sentenced to 10 and a half years for taking bribes. And now, the most recent occupant of the same role, Chen Xuyuan, is being investigated, along with a host of other management figures within the game.

“It is remarkable that so many top officials apparently felt protected enough to indulge in anything which could be considered graft, right in the middle of one of China’s longest and most intense anti-corruption campaigns in its history,” Wilson said. “And that’s not to mention the fact that Chinese football already has a longstanding terrible reputation when it comes to corruption, so it hardly seems like a safe hiding place for those on the take.”

What next for Chinese soccer?

Despite boasting a massive population and excelling at many sports, China has woefully underperformed at soccer for many years. The national men’s team is currently ranked 81th in the world, far below its Asian neighbors Japan and South Korea, who are in 20th and 27th place, according to FIFA. The only time China qualified for the World Cup, in 2002, the men’s team failed to score in any of its three matches.

Chinese soccer’s ineptitude has become a national joke. One person who takes particular offense at the bleak situation is Xi Jinping, who has been passionate about the sport since he was a child and has repeatedly called for improvement. In 2015, under the leadership of Xi, the Chinese government unveiled an ambitious blueprint to build 70,000 soccer pitches and get 50 million children and adults playing soccer by 2020, with the broader objective of becoming a “world soccer superpower” by 2050.

In the following years, Chinese schools were ordered to introduce the sport into their curriculums, and professional teams received a massive influx of funding from companies eager to support Xi’s ambitions. Expensive recruits were rampant in the CSL, where clubs rushed to spend tens of millions to acquire foreign players to elevate the competition.

Then, the pandemic hit, forcing the CSL to put games on hold for three years. Talents left. In the face of an economic downturn, companies backing the clubs had to cut spending. The national men’s soccer team was ruthlessly ridiculed online last year after falling 3-1 to Vietnam, a humiliating loss that officially ended its qualification campaign for the 2022 World Cup.

Wilson is not convinced that the ongoing anti-corruption purge will make any significant change to the state of play on the field, given that there have been “at least two other such big operations in the game over the last two decades or so, and these did not solve the issue.”

“It may be that the powers-that-be want to draw a line under the 2010s era, which saw a truly biblical amount of money and resources poured into the game to bring superstar players and coaches to China but made no difference to the fortunes of the national team,” Wilson said.

As a member of FIFA, the CFA should comply with the organization’s statutes, which require member associations to “be independent and avoid any form of political interference.” But “China has been given a total free pass on this and just continues to flaunt the particular rule, even though FIFA has penalized many other countries for the exact same thing,” said Dreyer. “The same thing has been said over and over again: Get politics out of football. Let footballing people make decisions, rather than politicians and government officials. Their interests are totally misaligned with the long-term success of Chinese football.”

The outsized focus on the national men’s team, whose performance is all that matters for Chinese sports officials, represents a host of structural and ideological obstacles that China needs to overcome to become a real soccer heavyweight.

“It is given absolute priority, and everything in Chinese football literally revolves around it,” Wilson said. “Anything else is an afterthought. Yet in successful football countries there is a much more equal balance of power between clubs, domestic leagues, and national associations.” As an example, leagues in Europe “are not regularly disrupted so the national team can take clubs’ players away for weeks on end to train together in preparation for matches.”

“It’s obvious that the Chinese national team’s problems are not caused by lack of practice time and that China has the power to make changes to achieve a better balance between various stakeholders in the game,” Wilson added. “This problem could be easily solved, but it is not, because it would require the General Administration of Sport and the CFA to give up some power. So it doesn’t happen. So these continuing anti-corruption drives are in some ways a symptom of that — they consistently show that the needs of politics is the key factor influencing Chinese football, not the needs of football itself.”