'Professional' Chinese football is a joke

• Source: Global Times
• [21:31 September 13 2009]
• Comments

By David Yang

They're an unique group of athletes, who used to be looked up to by millions of Chinese, but are now no more than a laughing stock to most of their compatriots.

They are Chinese football players, once lauded but, after their failure to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, now barely scraping a living.

Most of the Chinese footballers come from tixiao, or sports schools, where they're trained and get paid as amateur athletes. The players witnessed the country's embrace of capitalism, when the Chinese Football Association (CFA) were planning to kick off their own professional leagues in the early 1990s.

Starting in 1994, the Chinese Football Division A soon became a success. The CFA attracted powerful sponsors like Samsung, China Citic Group, Wanda Group and several other Stated-owned firms. Fanned by the media, the performance of teams became talk of the towns. The fame of these tixiao boys catapulted. Along with pop singers and movie stars, they were invited to attend Spring Festival galas produced by various local TV stations.

The leagues looked enticing not only to commoners but also fellow sportsmen, who could have never imagined making tens of thousands of yuan a month plus bonuses.

The leagues might have been called pro, but they were certainly lacking in professionalism.

The CFA constantly changes the schedule of leagues in preparation for the World Cup, Asian Cup and the Olympic qualifiers, as the officials counted their opportunities of promotion within China's sports hierarchy on the performance of the national team.

It seemed to work once in 2001, when China was struggling for a berth in the 2002 South Korea-Japan World Cup and the CFA rescheduled to allow players more time to practice with the national team.

The decision would later help the national team succeed in the qualifiers, but the lack of competitiveness also bred match-fixing in leagues where corruption was already common.

Most notably, in a derby game in the second last round of Division B that year, Chengdu Wuniu smashed Sichuan Mianyang 11-2, the highest score ever. Their main rivals Zhejiang were playing a game at the same time, and kept arguing with the referee during the match and waited for Chengdu's game to end. They then scored an unbelievable four times in the last eight minutes, enough to beat Chengdu and take first place in the league table. The fraud had never been so conspicuous.

Over the last few years, the reputation of Chinese football has deteriorated. The players' wages shrank tremendously because of a lack of interest from investors and an overflow of footballers.

To avoid an exodus of good players to rich clubs, the CFA established their unique transfer rules in 1998, which stipulates that a player needs to wait 30 months after his contract runs out at a club to become a free agent, a period of time spanning across three football seasons. Anyone who fails to abide by the rules will not be able to register in any other club.

The rules only rendered most players immovable. Even their transfer requests can be approved, a club, afraid of losing their own assets, would set a very high price tag on a player, enough to scare away the potential buyers.

On top of that, since the establishment of the leagues, Chinese clubs has this tradition of discussing only one-year contracts with their players by the end of a season.

Unlike in the West, a contract here is signed without an agent in between, only a take-it-or-leave-it offer.

The rules made each club a small bureaucracy. Players learned to curry favor with their bosses and management for potential transfer opportunities.

Few players ever tried to defy the CFA, or maybe no one can. Chinese athletes do not have a union to speak for themselves.

In recent years, hundreds if not thousands of footballers were laid off by the clubs at various levels. And sadly, no one seemed to care. The athletes may be playing in the "beautiful game," but their reality is all too ugly.

The author is the founder and editor of www.chinasportsreview. com