The People’s Republic of China is a twenty-first-century global superpower with the second-largest economy, the largest armed forces and the second-largest population. China has come to dominate the world we live in as we rely on it to produce nearly all of the goods which enable our lifestyle. Over the past 40 years since the economic liberalisation policies of Deng Xiaoping, China has made vast strides and eventually overtaken the rest of the world in virtually every conceivable area.

 

However, there is one area though in which it falls short. Football. Despite the undoubtedly huge pool of untapped talent in the general population and more than enough wealth to finance the sport properly, the level of the game is nowhere near the level of the world's football elite. Of course, one instantly makes comparisons to the US which is in a similar position, where the level of football (or soccer) is also not exactly fantastic, but there is a key difference. Whilst football is neither country’s national sport, the United States, being a laissez-faire capitalist society, has no real central impetus to change the country’s culture to make it into this football superpower. China on the other hand with its totalitarian ideology does, with its football fan President, Xi Jinping, having the ambition and also the willingness to drive change in the country. The question is, can this transition happen? Can the national team start to rub shoulders with international football royalty and can the Chinese Super League begin to compete with European leagues?

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The short answer is essentially no, at least not for a long time. The reason why football is so huge in Europe and South America is because it is woven into the tapestries of these countries. These countries do not require a central political driving factor to be where they are in the football world. Equally, if you look at other sports like cricket and baseball, they are huge in India and the US respectively, and why? Because they are so ingrained into the cultures of those countries. Therefore in the short to medium term, China can only ever be an artificial footballing country, as it lacks the grassroots obsession which characterises the game in Europe and South America. For the Chinese game to even get close to the level it is in these places, there will need to be support and finance from the very top of the Chinese government.

 

A sort of guinea pig for this is the current situation with the Saudi Professional League with the Saudi state ploughing biblical sums of money into investment in players and now also stadiums ahead of the 2034 World Cup. The Saudi League boasts some impressive names on its roster with Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar Jr. and Karim Benzema as well as many other former stars of Europe playing there. However, according to L’Équipe on French sports TV, a midtable clash in the third division of French football had six times the viewers of one of the Saudi Pro League’s most prestigious fixtures.

 

Now obviously why would a Saudi match have anywhere near the viewership of a French match in France but the point is that the global reach of the Saudi league is nowhere near the global reach of European leagues- especially the English Premier League. Furthermore, when one looks at the Saudi Arabian national team, unless you were an expert, you would find it very difficult to name even one Saudi player.

 

fSomething similar happened in China eight years ago back in the 2016/17 season with huge investment, again with big-name players being shipped in from Europe such as Oscar and Hulk, all being paid handsomely. However, when a salary cap was introduced in 2020 limiting the wages of foreign players to a measly £2.6 million a season, the league dried up almost immediately and the foreign talent which brought the international interest summarily upped sticks. With the Covid crisis and harsh Chinese restrictions biting hard economically, some clubs went to the wall with the collapse in 2021 of a club called Jiangsu Suning, which only a year before had offered a potential £1 million a week contract to Gareth Bale, epitomising the scale and speed of the downturn. Even in Saudi Arabia, spending in the summer transfer window before the start of this season was significantly down on spending in the years before. What is clear then, is that for now anyway, these are artificial leagues, very much dependent on the will of the government and more importantly their money, for survival and growth.

 

In my opinion, the only way China will ever be able to rival the level of club football and international football in Europe and South America is to create a football pyramid similar to those present in European leagues and to promote the game at a grassroots level. For the Chinese game to thrive, it needs to move away from being a state-sponsored sport and become the sport for the masses which it is in the countries where the game is thriving. Paradoxically, that may require a level of initial effort and financing that is only possible with government backing. Interestingly though this approach may work. The spread of cricket in India by the British authorities was in the end hugely successful and India is certainly much more of a cricketing nation than the UK these days, with both a hugely successful national team and club league system. Indeed from my own experiences of the country, I saw kids playing cricket on street corners, much the same as how kids play football in parks in England and in the favelas of Brazil.

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To conclude then, in principle, China can develop itself into a football nation, it is just that there has to be the will for that to happen and the appetite to continue that effort for the length of time needed for it to become embedded in Chinese society. With President Xi, they clearly have a leader with the desire to do this, the question is whether his successors will continue to have the same appetite and necessary fervour to really drive forward the game. To revisit a point mentioned earlier, they need someone willing to ‘re-sew’ the tapestry of Chinese culture, to include football, and that is no simple task!