Ma Haiping, a 26-year-old designer from Shanghai and self-described football fan gets straight to the point when asked about Chinese football. "It's not so good," he says, wearing an expression of mild embarrassment on his face. "The problem is not only the players' lack of ability, but the organisation of football in China is very ineffective."
Ma, like millions of other Chinese, holds the beautiful game close to his heart, but despite China's huge population, the country has yet to achieve anything resembling success either on the international stage or in its domestic league. The problem, almost everyone agrees, is that after 14 years of professional football in China, the game is still not being run like a business.
And yet it all started out so well. Jia A, China's first professional league, was formed around the same time as Japan's J-League in 1993. Crowds initially flocked to stadiums and great rivalries began to develop between the big four teams - Dalian, Shanghai Shenhua, Beijing Guoan and Shandong. Throughout the 1990s, Jia A seemed to prove what everybody knew all along - that the country had the potential to one day be a world footballing power - and enjoy the commercial and sponsorship trappings that go along with such success. There were complaints about the standard of play, but the crowds still came and big-name sponsors such as Pepsi showed no hesitation and signed a five-year-deal in 1999 for the league to carry its name. "Chinese football did enjoy a good spell in the nineties," says Ma. "We were able to compete very well against other teams in our region - this gave us pride in Asia."
Black whistles, black eyes
Today, the J-League has developed to become the commercial and sporting benchmark for all Asian football leagues, and the Japanese team has won the Asian Cup three times. Things did not go quite as smoothly for the Chinese league. Match-fixing allegations, corruption, cheating and the national team's woes in international play put the league into a downward spiral.
The infamous "Black Whistle" affair at the end of the 2001 season badly tainted the league's image in China. In the incident, five teams in China's second division had colluded to fix matches on the final day of the season to ensure that certain clubs would gain promotion to the top division. The situation was so blatant that one match ended with one team scoring three goals in stoppage time to seal promotion on goal difference by a single goal, while another club won a crucial match 11-2. Match-fixing punishments were handed out to five teams and one Chinese referee was jailed for 10 years after being found guilty of taking bribes to influence the outcome of matches.
Following the scandal a series of measures were adopted, including hiring foreign referees to cut down on bribes being offered to match officials. Ma believes these steps have helped, but are not enough. "People still haven't forgotten this scandal," he says. "It's hard to say if the league will ever recover from it." Pepsi pulled its sponsorship soon after and disgusted fans left in droves. Oddly enough, China qualified for its first ever World Cup at the same time, though it bowed out with three defeats and no goals.
The squad recovered to make it to the final of the Asian Cup in 2004, but lost out to Japan in a painful defeat. That same year football authorities re-launched the league under the new name China Super League (CSL), to distance itself from Jia A. The CSL had more stringent criteria for membership to guarantee professional management of both on- and off-pitch activities, and a comprehensive range of measures to ensure an effective youth development programme at each club to unearth future star players. German multinational Siemens was announced as a sponsor, and it looked as if Chinese football might finally mend its ways.
Same league, different name
However, the 2004 re-launch changed little except the league's name, says Terry Rhoads of Zou, a Shanghai-based sports marketing company. "The 2004 changes were superficial," he says. "I can't think of any example where real changes came about."
While Rhoads agrees that the potential of the sport in China is indeed massive, he says the game's administration is riddled with problems top to bottom. "There are optimists about Chinese football," he says, "but I'm not positive, because Chinese football needs to be smashed to pieces and rebuilt. When anyone asks me for advice about sponsoring the Chinese league, I always tell them to think long and hard about it - this is a dog that has a lot of fleas."
Indeed, 2004 saw yet more match-fixing allegations, resulting in teams leaving the pitch and refusing to continue matches. Siemens dropped its sponsorship, fearing of negative publicity by being associated with the farcical scenes. Worse was to follow when a catastrophic series of results meant China failed to qualify for the 2006 World Cup, and football seemingly reached its lowest ebb.
The key problem, Rhoads argues, is that the league is not run as a business. "It's a league which has been built and owned by state-owned enterprises," he says. And, like even some of the best-run state firms, team owners are slow to respond to the needs of the marketplace, which dictate that football should be in the business of entertainment. "Either they have to evolve or die, because that's what happening to other state-owned enterprises in China - they are holding IPOs and such like," says Rhoads.
The league's inefficiencies can make for some odd developments. Abrupt ownership changes and hasty moves have created a constantly shifting league that casual fans struggle to follow. Team names can change during the middle of the season, and sometimes more than once. In 2003, Liaoning Bird changed its name to simply Liaoning at the start of the season, only to become Beijing Sanyuan after four rounds. Two games later they switched to Liaoning Zhongshun and moved back to Fushun in Liaoning after round 11.
"Chinese football could be so much more than it is," says Rhoads. "But it won't reach its potential until the people running the league begin to run it as entertainment бн right now the mission is to help the national team more than anything else.
"But the football league, if you looked around the world at the English Premier League (EPL), the Serie A, in Italy and the way they are run - as international leagues which are the best in the world - then how can the Chinese league be competitive, when it's essentially a state-owned enterprise?"
Sports ministry authorities who control the league seem oblivious to the problems, Rhoads says. "It strikes me that the number one thing they are forgetting is that without the consumer you don't have a business, and if you don't have the business, then it's not sustainable. In China, take away the state support and the league would come down crashing down."
Following the EPL model - which would mean offering a high-quality package in modern stadiums, offering them fresh food and drink in a clean environment - is what it would take to win customer loyalty, he says. "Maybe this way, instead of people going to KTV or restaurants or movies, they might want to spend their weekend wanting to watch pro league football."
The fan's view
Frank Ding is the kind of fan the CSL would like to attract more of - dedicated and loyal to his team through thick and thin. He is a member of the Blue Devils, Shanghai Shenhua's hardcore fan club with a membership of 1,500. He regularly appears in the Chinese media whenever the sporting press is looking for fan's views, and has been a fan of Shenhua since its inception in 1993. Despite his love for his team, Ding is under no illusions about the state of Chinese football. "Things have improved recently, that is true," he says. "But before this, with the match-fixing scandals, they could not have gotten any worse" He agrees with Rhoads that government control is the main obstacle hindering the game's development and leaving it open to corruption.
A frequent call in China is for more administrative transparency both at club and association level, so that corruption and other wrongdoings would not be so easy to conceal. Ding dismisses these cries: "In China, having that sort of openness at that level is impossible."
Ding says the government always implements policies that prevent the league from evolving naturally, often putting national considerations ahead of the domestic league matters. His club, Shanghai Shenhua, was ordered to leave its 35,000 soccer-specific stadium in Hongkou in north-eastern Shanghai and move into a draughty athletics stadium across town so that Hongkou could be renovated for the Women's World Cup being held in China this year, though he believes the improvements could have been made without requiring anyone to move out. As a result, Shenhua's attendance is down and fans are not happy about leaving their spiritual home. "In China there are so many football lovers, but we have been let down for so long by those in control of football," says Ding. "Our league and national team could be so much better if they were organised along different lines."
Government ownership also means clubs do not have control of their revenue streams. Contrast this situation with Major League Soccer in the US - a country far less in love with the sport than China. In the US, clubs must either have their own soccer-specific stadium or have plans in place to build one. The policy saw clubs start to make a profit for the first time last year as they no longer have to pay rent to owners of American football stadiums.
There's still hope
Despite the doom and gloom surrounding the sport in China, this year the CSL reported that average attendances were up from 10,000 last season to over 16,000 this season. China's legion of players joining foreign clubs continues to grow - Dong Fangzhuo at Manchester United is a notable example. No one can say that the huge potential is still not there. China is still a football-crazy country - anyone here during last year's World Cup couldn't have failed to notice groups of locals huddled around TV sets on every street corner tuning into every match. Figures from FIFA reveal that, despite not having a team in the tournament, China was the largest single TV market during the 2006 World Cup accounting for 3.98 billion viewings.
What Chinese football needs more than anything is for the market to be fully opened up and for the state to relinquish control. This does not mean that the ruling association still cannot be powerful. China may wish to look to the MLS, whose revenue-sharing model between all clubs could work well in China to ensure a level playing field. But clubs need more autonomy to develop their local markets. By forcing the domestic game to "serve the national interest", government control is having precisely the opposite effect.
Almost all national team success is built on strong domestic competitions which develop a pool of talent for countries to pick from, and it is here that China can focus its efforts. Healthy domestic leagues help develop star players, without whom national team success is difficult. Once these conditions are met, marketing and sponsorship opportunities increase tenfold.The national team would benefit from a stronger league if it were entrusted to manage itself and allow professional sports marketing firms control how the game is sold to the public.
In recent years China has enjoyed great success importing foreign ideas and principles, but so far its football league has avoided such influences. Taking a leaf out of the book of any top European league would be a good place to start if China wants its domestic league to develop successfully.
There is without doubt still hope fo Chinese football. The game continues to attract sponsors, albeit mainly domestic ones, and despite its lack of success, top matches in China can still attract capacity crowds. This undying love for the beautiful game is the reason football in China remains a holy grail for marketers.
