Why can’t China play football?

It would be tough for any country to lose 7-0 in a World Cup qualifier, but when the losing team is China, and the thrashing is at the hands of arch-rival Japan, it is deeply humiliating. The defeat was ‘shameful’, according to an editorial last week in the Global Times, a state-controlled tabloid, while the Shanghai-based Oriental Sports Daily called it ‘disastrous’, adding: ‘When the taste of bitterness reaches its extreme, all that is left is numbness.’ Some commentators called for the men’s team to be disbanded, bemoaning that a country of 1.4 billion people could not find 11 men capable of winning a match.

It is almost a decade since Xi Jinping, China’s supposedly football-mad President, launched a multi-billion dollar national crusade to turn the country into a footballing superpower. While China had forged ahead economically, the ultimate symbol of soft power remained a western stronghold, and that grip needed to be broken if China was to realise Xi’s ‘China Dream’ of becoming a truly great power.