Xi Jinping Loves Soccer. Why Is China’s Team So Bad?

0:00So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. When you're running a business, the best days are the ones where priorities stay on track. For midsize and large companies, risk can affect multiple parts of the organization at once, from property and liability to cyber and regulatory challenges.

0:42At that level, managing risk becomes an ongoing discipline. At the Hartford, the focus is on helping businesses manage risk before it turns into something more disruptive. And when losses do happen, that work is paired with insurance coverage shaped by years of underwriting, risk engineering, and claims experience. Learn more at thehartford.com slash risk mitigation. Policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut. As industries evolve faster than ever, companies need an environment that accelerates strategic growth. And Michigan delivers on that promise.

1:17From emerging startups to global enterprises, Michigan offers what executives value most, a resilient, innovative ecosystem, diverse communities that attract top talent, and a quality of life that supports work-life balance. With our unified Team Michigan approach, businesses scale faster and compete at the highest level. Michigan, pure opportunity. Seize your opportunity at michiganbusiness.org. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio News

1:55The final stage is still being set, but even before the confetti rains down on this weekend's 2026 FIFA World Cup champions, one thing is certain. This tournament has been unforgettable. And no, I'm not talking about the officiating. 2026 marked the first time that the games were split across three host nations. The first time in nearly 20 years that the field expanded to allow additional teams. And the first time that nine Asian Football Confederation members made the cut. And while all teams from Asia have since been eliminated, their presence in the tournament was more than a statistical milestone.

2:35It was electric for fans. History in the making. For Japan! It's history and a very proud moment for Uzbekistan as they play at a World Cup for the first time ever. In 2002, just four teams from Asia made it into the World Cup. Today, that number has more than doubled. Supercharged, of course, by FIFA's decision to expand the field to 48 teams. But even with that expansion, there's one glaring absence from the pitch. China. China defeated. Every four years, Chinese football fans ask the exact same question. Where's Team China in soccer? China's got 1.4 billion people. Y 'all couldn't find 11 people to kick a ball?

3:18Since the first World Cup in 1930, China's men's team has qualified just once in 2002. It's a staggering drought. And it comes even as Beijing has poured millions, if not billions, into growing the game. One that holds a special place in the heart of its leader. I used to play football here, but that was over 50 years ago. The pitches were all dirt back then. That was Chinese President Xi Jinping during a visit to his former school in Beijing in 2016. Xi rarely speaks publicly about his personal life, but over the years he's made no secret of his love for football and his hopes for its future in China.

4:01Xi Jinping's three wishes for Chinese football go back to 2011, the year before he became the president. Mark Dreyer is a veteran sports writer who splits his time between Beijing and the UK. And they were to qualify for the World Cup, to host the World Cup and to win the World Cup. But more than a decade later, none of those goals has been achieved. That's despite China making football a national priority in 2015. The struggle has become so visible that even Xi himself has acknowledged it. Here, he's speaking to Thailand's prime minister in 2023, after China's men's team beat Thailand in a World Cup qualifier.

4:42Oh, really? China won? I think that was mostly a fluke. I'm not too confident in the national team's level. Over the years, China has invested heavily to become a sporting powerhouse. At the Olympics, it regularly tops the medal tables, which makes its struggle on the pitch all the more striking. There's nothing really that compares to the lack of success that China has had there. And I think for the people, it is embarrassing because there are a lot of football fans in China. During China's booming year, the past three decades, economy is rising so fast that it's every opportunity outside football.

5:19Eric Zhu covers China's economy for Bloomberg Economics. He says China's football woes are tied to people wanting to cash in on the country's economic boom, rather than dream big about becoming a pro athlete. As long as you have a good education, it's very easy to make money. But Eric says this isn't just about individual choices. The bigger question is why a country that's excelled through planning, investment and state support hasn't been able to apply the same formula to football. You have seen China has made huge success in everything, right? Mostly everything, right? From infrastructure, high-speed training, you know, to robotics, to AI.

6:02On the sports, at least, they have made great success in Olympic Games. So it looked like China model is so successful in everywhere. So it's a top-down engineering approach. But it doesn't work for football.

6:22This is The Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Wan Ha. Every week, we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons and businesses that drive this ever-shifting region. Today on the show, why China struggles to crack the formula for football and what that reveals about the limits of state power in a game that thrives on grassroots participation.

6:53In the world of Olympic sports, China has perfected a science, identifying talent early, controlling variables and refining performance over years. It's a top-down system that's produced generations of champions in diving, gymnastics and weightlifting. But sports writer Mark Dreyer says when it comes to football, that state-engineered top-down formula has fallen flat. And I want to be very clear, I hate, I hate the stereotype that paints some of these Olympic athletes as robots. I think that's, it's not helpful at all. But the reality is that if you're talking about gymnastics, if you're talking about diving, the training and the rigor and the discipline is incredible.

7:36And Chinese people excel in this and they win gold medals. And so the authorities just think we can take this and just simply move it over to football. Mark says one reason the Olympic approach doesn't work for football is that it's too intense for those still learning to love the beautiful game. The pressure knocks the fun out and kids lose interest or coaches smother talent before it has a chance to grow. China has this tendency sometimes to take everything too seriously too quickly. There's a story that I think resonates and shows you how difficult that is in China. It was a Spanish coach who was playing at one of the football academies in the south.

8:14And they had some fantastic facilities. And he mentioned that when he watched the kids, the Chinese kids play, he wasn't struck by their technical ability or lack of it. It wasn't about that. He was struck by how quiet the sport was being played. They were almost silent. There was no communication between the players. But also when they scored a goal, they would just quietly turn around and go back for the restart and play again. And that, I think, for most of the rest of the world, football at its core is fun. It's the beautiful game for a reason. It brings so much joy and passion to billions, literally billions of people around the world.

8:52The academy Mark mentioned is one of three avenues for young players in China. It's a professional academy, similar to what you'd see in the English Premier League. Top talent is identified and funneled into boarding schools to train full time. Beyond that, there are local associations which run training camps and thousands of public schools where football is incorporated into the school curriculum with the goal of getting kids to play regularly. But Mark says those efforts won't do enough to capture the grassroots magic needed for the game to thrive, especially when culturally sports are often seen as a distraction from the main priority for many Chinese families.

9:33I think what's fundamentally missing is the huge base, which is the foundation for everything else, and that's participation. But that's amateur, enthusiastic people playing because they want to play. And unfortunately, much of that has been squeezed out in China because there's no space in the system when academics are prioritized so early. China's education system is considered one of the most competitive in the world. And that race for academic survival begins almost at birth. From toddler prep schools to high school boot camps, millions of students are funneled into a single track, all leading up to one life-defining college entrance exam, the Gaokao.

10:16Traditionally, every parent was seen going to college, going through the Gaokao, college entrance exam. That's the most typical way to get success in China. They don't believe they're playing football, being very good at sports. is a very successful career. I think the key issue is not they don't have Messi or Ronaldo. The key issue is probably in China, if Messi was born in China, I guess he would probably end up like the school team in Tsinghua instead of a national Chinese team. So I think because most of the kids, eventually they have to go to the education track. Even if you are very gifted in football, I guess very few of them will stick to the end.

10:59Eric says part of that mentality can be traced to China's modern history. For much of the 20th century, China was simply too poor and too focused on survival to invest in sports. Then, not long after the country opened its economy in the late 1970s, the one-child policy was introduced. That limited most families to a single child and made it unlikely that you'd bank your child's future on pro sports. If you have two children, three children, so you have more diversity, right? So now they cannot risk putting their only child on a very uncertain, on a very risky career path. So education, going through the entrance exam, that's the most desired way to move off to social ladder.

11:50After the break, whether Beijing's latest efforts to move the needle might finally bring the change and World Cup success that's eluded China and President Xi for so long.

12:15manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English, like if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve the workflow and your agent handles the rest. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions, and executing your strategies exactly as defined. An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API.

12:54Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash market. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

13:42break each morning on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen.

13:53Since reaching the high point of qualifying for the World Cup in 2002, it's been largely downhill for China's men's football team. China's women's side has qualified for nine World Cups and was even a runner-up in 1999. That's when they lost a heartbreaking final to the U.S. team and Brandi Chastain's famous penalty kick.

14:20But they, too, have struggled to find consistent success. And so in 2015, two years after taking office, President Xi made it his mission to change the narrative around Chinese football. He announced that his government would make football a national priority. That was a key time in the development of the sports industry because China looked towards the US and I think it realized that about 3 % of the US GDP was coming from sports. China, the equivalent was a fraction of 1%. So they thought, wow, if we can recreate something similar or even bigger than the US has, we can have this new driver, a new genuine driver of economic growth.

15:01So in 2014, they put out a big policy document, which was to develop the sports industry as a whole. Now, the first area that they looked at was football. And in 2015, there was a 50-point plan that was released to overhaul and oversee the redevelopment of Chinese football. Now, with one or two exceptions, perhaps on, you know, points of ideology here and there, it was a very, very sensible plan. If you took all the top international football consultants and said, what does China need to do? All the points were in there. The problem has been implementation. On paper, China seemed to have a clear roadmap.

15:40The 50-point plan listed out ways to revive the sport, from expanding football programs in schools and building thousands of new pitches to overhauling the way professional football was governed and run. But turning that vision into reality has proven difficult. China's top professional football league, the Super League, has been plagued by corruption for decades, from scandals involving bribery to match-fixing and financial misconduct that stretches back to the 1990s. Its most famous players have also been swept up in corruption scandals, like Li Tia, China's former national team coach. Li, who once played in the English Premier League for Everton, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for corruption in 2024.

16:26Beijing has launched repeated anti-corruption campaigns to clean up the sport. But Mark says the same problems keep resurfacing, and they still plague China's domestic league today. Well, I think it's been a series of false starts, to be honest. And a lot of that has stemmed from some of the corruption and the match fixing. And every few years we've had investigations into this and people get penalized and officials and players and referees as well get banned from the game. or get sent to jail. At the moment, we have the Chinese Super League in this farcical situation where more than half of the teams, nine of the 16 teams, started the season on minus points because of various penalties they'd been given.

17:10This is unheard of in any other country in the world. And it makes, in my opinion, a bit of a mockery of this year. It's not about who's the best on the pitch. It's about who can navigate the point differential better than the others. I'm not saying they shouldn't have given the penalties. You have to crack down and try to stamp this stuff out. But the fact that we've seen yet another cycle, I think that is probably one of the largest underlying issues that they still haven't been able to truly get out of the sport in China. For Mark, one of the biggest obstacles is how the sport is governed. While China has taken steps to give its professional leagues more independence, the broader football system remains closely tied to the state through the Chinese Football Association.

17:55That's an arm of the Chinese government. And that means football is often shaped by political priorities in ways that would be unusual in the rest of the world. The whole Chinese FA is de facto part of the sports ministry. I mean, if that isn't government interference, I don't know what is, but China gets a free pass from FIFA on this. And so you have political people making football decisions, and that fundamentally is not going to work long term. Ultimately, Mark says, developing football in China requires a cultural shift. More people need to embrace the everyday lifestyle of the sport, not just chase conventional markers of success like money or status.

18:38He says without a grassroots base of casual players, there's no foundation to build talent upward. In countries like the UK, even pub and village teams are part of a connected system that allows players to rise or fall naturally. China, on the other hand, lacks that structure, leaving too few pathways for players to progress from the bottom up. What we need is that huge base at the bottom of the pyramid, which is just grassroots, organic people playing because they want to play. In China, certainly historically, people were selected from that base and put into a much more serious track far too early.

19:18And really focused on just the top elite professional things, which is the tiny little triangle at the top of this larger pyramid. And to get that bigger base of players, China needs to change incentives for parents. convince them to buy in. Here's Eric Zhu again. In the near term, I think that some good fix is from the social background, you know, improve the social safety net, give more protection to parents who want to invest in football, even if their children cannot make it a good quality, they can still get something. But in the longer term, I think it has to be something about parents need to, you know, focus less on education and want to encourage their children to play football, right, or other sports.

20:04But this should be market-based instead of, you know, from the government intervention, government direction, to give them more incentives and change the system. Now, the problem is China's system is such that you just can't really operate outside of state control. And so it's not a realistic solution for China without changing the system, and they're not going to do that. What they could do is perhaps, perhaps to make football, for example, part of Gaokao achievement. So, you know, maybe 10 % is your performance in football or in sports or in something non-specifically academic. It would prevent, for example, this cliff that we talk about at the age of 12 or 13, where the youth sports just see a massive drop in participation as these outside distractions are dropped so that people can focus on the academics.

20:56And that would just create that larger base. And then naturally, you have more people just float to the top and you have more people achieving at the top, top levels. Do you guys, either of you guys see any signs or data points that suggest China can change, that China can improve when it comes to football? You know, what's one hopeful sign and maybe a caveat that you see there? there? I guess one hopeful sign for football, but it looks like a bad sign for the economy and not a very good sign for youth people because the economy is slowing down. And actually, the job prospects, the career prospects for fresh college graduates, it's actually looking not very good right now, especially given, you know, the AI era, right?

21:40But from football perspective, that could be a good thing because now parents will realize, okay, the education is not necessarily so important in the longer-run career. So they might rethink, if my child is a very good football player, why not let him or her try football?

22:03This is The Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Won Ha. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. If you liked the episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Tick Asia wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

22:31This is Tony Ayo from The Real Report with Tony Ayo and Uncle Murda. You ever notice how everything keeps going up, rent, streaming, even extra salsa at your favorite burrito spot. But with Boost Mobile, you don't have to play the will it's go up soon game. Boost Mobile offers an unlimited talk, text, and data plan at a price that'll never go up. It's the same price you'll pay for life. Switch now for unlimited wireless at a price that'll never go up, only at Boost Mobile. After 30 gigabytes, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers will pay$25 a month as long as they remain active on the Boost Unlimited plan.

23:02The Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit returns to Singapore on July 22nd. Our fifth annual Asia-Pacific Summit will explore how business and finance leaders are shaping the next phase of globalization by strengthening resilience and driving a multi-speed energy transition across Asia's diverse markets. Join us for solutions-driven discussions and networking opportunities. Thank you to our summit advisor, Bangkok Bank. Learn more at BloombergLive.com slash SBS-Singapore.