James Montague and Jaime FlorCruz have a feature piece up on CNN.com on the state of soccer (sorry, football) in China. It details the trials and tribulations of establishing a professional league in the PRC and FIFA’s hopes to tap into China’s legions of soccer fans in the face of corruption and match fixing. The whole piece is worth a read, especially for sports fans, but author Rowan Simons makes a point which bridges the gap between the world of athletic competition and the ills which face Chinese society as a whole:
“The CSL was already the third attempt at setting up the league because the other two collapsed due to corruption and fan violence,” Rowan Simons, author of Bamboo Goalposts, a recent book about soccer in China, told CNN.
“There’s corruption at every single level of the game, from the top to the very bottom. It’s an indictment of wider Chinese society and representative of a much bigger problem with corruption and nepotism. It’s more visible with football because your results are taken by your performance in international competition. So there is nowhere to hide. They are 85th in FIFA’s world rankings with a population of over a billion people.”
And with that, I will continue watching the Celtics/Magic game because there’s no corruption in the NBA, right?
Well, corruption aside, Chinese soccer still used to be such a “tragedy.”
Don’t know if you heard the joke, but rumor has it that when China won Korea 3:0, one guy was having the following phone conversation:
Right right right…they won 3:0; right…they drove the ball into the goal post three times; right right…it was the Chinese team; right…it was the men soccer team; …their opponents were also men!
对对对…..是3比0；对对对…..是进了三个球；对对对……是中国队;对对对……….是男足；对对对………..对方也是男足！
I believe the only reason Chinese soccer team is so “weak” is that people from almost all the other countries also play soccer, and most of them take it seriously…