Former Top Football Officials Convicted Of Corruption

Another raft of sentences has been handed down by courts in four cities in Liaoning  as authorities continue to clean up China’s corruption-plagued professional football. Those convicted include two former heads of the league, the most senior figures from the sport to have been put on trial.

Nan Yong and his predecessor Xie Yalong were both sentenced to 10-and-a-half years in jail for accepting bribes. Former national team manager, Wei Shaohui, received a similar sentence. All three will also pay fines via the confiscation of assets. Four former players on the national team were sentenced to up to six years’ jail and fined for taking bribes and match fixing. The total of eleven convictions in this round follow 39 sentences handed down previously (full list).

The anti-corruption drive in the sport started in 2009, leading to dozens of referees, players, officials and coaches being arrested for match-fixing, bribe-taking and illegal gaming. The structure of the sport is also being reorganized to break the monopoly grip of the Chinese Football Association as regulator and operator of all aspects of the game in China. For a country that is investing money and effort into reflecting its national pride in its emerging global power in the mirror of its sporting prowess–and claims to have invented football–the confluence in the game 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, the years in which China’s leaders dream of landing FIFA World Cup, seem a long way off.

One Law, Two Systems

The law is ruling overtime in China, and doing so under several spotlights that cast it in an uneven light.

Xie Yalong, the 56 year old former head of China’s professional football league, has just gone on trial, the most senior official to date in the corruption scandal that has engulfed the sport and captured the attention of a nation. Dozens of referees, players, officials and coaches have been arrested since an anti-corruption investigation started in 2009. Xie has been charged with taking more than 1.7 million yuan ($270 million) in bribes. His successor, Nan Yong, faces similar charges.

Xie’s defence is that he is guilty but not as guilty as charged, and that he is a victim of the legal system, having been mistreated during the investigation. It is a line that resonates with many of the public, who are familiar with local official corruption and the heavy handed treatment that can be meted out to those who run up against it. As is emerging in the case of Bo Xilai, the disgraced former Party boss of Chongqing who is now being very publicly subjected to the rule of law, that can be heavy handed in the extreme. Some of those convicted during Bo leadership in the city are now petitioning to have their convictions overturned. Meanwhile, two officials from Wukan had been expelled from the Communist Party over illegal land deals that eventually led to the social uprising that saw locals run Party officials out of their town last year. Eighteen  others are being dealt with under the Party’s disciplinary procedures, a reminder that there are parallel systems of punishment.

 

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.