More Convictions In China’s Soccer Bribes Scandal

Another raft of sentences has been handed down in the bribes-taking scandal that has plagued Chinese football. Most prominent among the latest 39 convictions are:

• Yang Yimin, the former deputy chief of the Chinese Football Association (CFA), who has been sentenced to ten and a half years in prison for taking bribes totaling 1.3 million yuan ($206,000). He will also have personal property worth 200,000 yuan confiscated.
• Zhang Jianqiang, former head of the referees’ committee, who has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for taking bribes totalling 2.7 million yuan. He will have  personal property worth 250,000 yuan confiscated.
• Li Zhimin, former president of Shaanxi Guoli Club, who has beeb sentenced to five years in prison for taking bribes totaling 2.5 million yuan. He has had personal property worth 250,000 yuan confiscated.

Earlier in the week, China’s former top referee, Lu Jun, was sentenced to five and a half years in jail for accepting bribes. Trials are still pending for several more former CFA officials, including former vice president Nan Yong and his predecessor Xie Yalong, and the former head of the national team, Wei Shaohui.

China’s Black Whistles Get Jail Time

Time has been blown on the Golden Whistle. Lu Jun, who earned that nickname when he was one of the country’s leading soccer referees, has been sentenced to five and a half years in jail for taking more than RMB710,000 ($113,000) in bribes to fix matches between 1999 and 2003. He is also to have personal property worth RMB100,000 confiscated. Lu is the man on the left of the Xinhua file picture to the right, taken in 2002, the year he became the first Chinese to officiate in a World Cup Finals.

Lu was one of nine convicted on corruption charges relating to Chinese football, whose professional soccer leagues have been plagued with allegations of gambling, match fixing and corrupt referees for years. The most severe sentence imposed in this latest batch of convictions was seven years imprisonment handed down to another Black Whistle, as corrupt referees are known, Huang Junjie. He is to have RMB200,000 of personal property confiscated. The former manager of the top professional league, the Super League, Lu Feng, is to serve six and a half years for corruption.

Other cases outstanding include the trials of Zhang Jianqiang, ex-director of the referees committee of the Chinese Football Association (CFA), and a former CFA vice-president, Yang Yimin. Both men’s trials started in December. (Update: Their sentences have now been handed down.)

Some 20 referees, players, officials and coaches have been arrested in a crackdown that stared in 2009 to cleanse the scandal-tainted game. These include former CFA vice-president Nan Yong, who was arrested in March 2010, and his predecessor Xie Yalong. They are still awaiting trial.

Several top-flight clubs, including Shandong Luneng, Shanghai Shenhua, Henan Jianye, Changchun Yatai and Jiangsu Shuntian, were implicated in the scandal. Shanghai Shenhua, for which French international Nicolas Anelka has recently signed, spent nearly $1 million bribing officials and referees such as Lu, the court in Dandong in Liaoning trying Lu was told.

The corruption scandals have overshadowed a dismal performance on the field by China’s national team. Its men’s side has failed to qualify for the next World Cup in Brazil, as it failed to do for the previous two. It also failed to qualify for the London Olympics tournament later this year, as did even its women’s team, which has been a rare beacon of success for Chinese teams in recent years. Even more humbling, China’s national team ranks 76th in the world on FIFA’s rankings. Neighbors Japan and South Korea rank 30th and 34th respectively.

As well as cleaning up the professional game and restoring the luster of the Super League by importing stars like Anelka, the education and sports ministry has launched an aggressive youth development program, including bringing in Jan Riekerink, who was previously coach of the storied Ajax youth team in his native Holland. Meanwhile, more than 100 promising young players have been sent to top professional clubs in Europe and South America in the hope that they or their successors can form the nucleus of a national side that could compete in a World Cup on Chinese soil, still dreamed of by the CFA for 2026.

A Chinese Kick For Brazilian Sport

China knows how to build for and stage major international sporting events. The Beijing Olympics in 2008 was a success on both scores in anyone’s book. 2016 Olympics host, Rio de Janeiro, is to benefit from that expertise, as is football’s 2014 FIFA World Cup, also to be held in Brazil. Among the welter of bilateral agreements signed during Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff’s state visit to China this week is a cooperation and investment agreement for Chinese assistance at the two events.

Though details are scanty, FIFA will be relieved; it has been fretting that Brazil is running behind in developing the stadiums and other infrastructure for its tournament. A little Chinese civil engineering expertise should get the projects back on track. And for China, the goodwill that should generate with FIFA and a little up-close look at World Cup preparations shouldn’t go amiss as its own football association nurtures dreams of bidding for the World Cup in 2026.

 

Cleansing China’s Corrupt Football

If China is to have any realistic expectation of bidding for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, it will have to clean up the endemic corruption, match-fixing and illegal gaming in its domestic game. It now looks likely that early next year Chinese football will have the opportunity of a public cleansing with the trials of seven former Chinese Football Association officials on charges of bribery and match-fixing.

For more than a year, police have been cracking down on the rot within the game with a couple of teams-worth of players, referees and administrators across the country detained for questioning. Last September, Xie Yalong, the former head of the CFA was taken into police custody for questioning along with Wei Shaohui, a former manager of the national team, and Li Dongsheng, the CFA official who headed the referees’ commission. Police were said to be investigating whether the men had any connections to Xie’s successor, Nan Yong, and two of his colleagues at the CFA, Yang Yimin and Zhang Jianqiang, who had been detained early in the year on suspicion of bribe-taking and match-fixing. Now all six plus a seventh CFA official, Fan Guangming, whose arrest in November 2009 started it all, are to be prosecuted, according to reports earlier this week in the Guangdong-based newspaper Soccer Monday (via China Daily).

Xie, who was installed as head of the CFA in 2005 from outside the sport to clean up the domestic professional league and improve the standing of the national team, is reportedly accused of taking bribes to secure hosting the East Asian Football Championship for Chongqing in 2006. It is said he, along with Nan and Yang, will not face match-fixing charges, only those of bribery and malfeasance — which may make a conviction easier to obtain as, legal experts say, the law does not define match-fixing clearly. There may be a loophole if matches are shown to be fixed by nobbling referees rather than players.

That is likely to be fixed along with the same purpose as handing out some exemplary high-profile sentences. For a country that is investing a lot of money and effort into reflecting its national pride in its emerging global power in the mirror of its sporting prowess, the confluence in football of corruption and low sporting standing is of too great importance to the Party leadership for it to be a mere spectator even if 2026 or even 2030 still seem a long way off.

 

When Will China Get A FIFA World Cup?

Where does FIFA’s award of the World Cup to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 leave China’s possible aspirations to host the 2026 tournament? We noted in July that the Chinese Football Association was considering the feasibility of a bid for 2026, despite its current tribulations and China’s relatively lowly standing in the football world. The CFA’s head, Wei Di, has now repeated that he favors China giving it a go.

In one sense both awards should give the Wei some encouragement. FIFA set great store in hosting its World Cups in countries where the tournament will give a boost to the game. Russia is a footballing power of long standing, but its football infrastructure is woefully antiquated and will need a thorough overhaul. Qatar, on the other hand, ranks even lower than China as a footballing nation, but bears the standard for the Middle East, a region that hitherto has not hosted the tournament.

FIFA’s informal continental rotation meant the 2022 tournament was always going to be awarded to an Asian nation. That is went to West Asia, and not to South Korea, Australia or Japan, the three other contenders, may leave the door open for an Asia-Pacific nation in 2026. Two East Asian World Cups in succession would have been out of the question.

Beijing hosted the 2008 Olympics with spectacular success, so FIFA should have little doubt that China can pull off staging its flagship event. The question will be is 2026 the right moment to endorse a world power that is not as yet a footballing one. While it is way to early to say, FIFA may first prefer to give a boost to the game in another Asia-Pacific nation, the U.S., and have China bide its time until 2030.