【妖妖酱】The World Cup memory Xi Jinping most wants to delete | Xi Jinping's football dream, why it became a nightmare for Chinese football? Football politics
This episode, combined with reporting from The Economist’s sports journalist, thoroughly outlines how Chinese President Xi Jinping’s political interference in football has led Chinese football to failure. From the three wishes in 2011 to the fifty-item plan in 2015, the bubble of money‑driven football, the intrusion of administrative power, and the mismatch between the nationwide system and market mechanisms turned football from a strategic industry into a reputational liability.
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Hello, everyone, I’m Yaoyao Jiang. The World Cup has been going on for several days, and the Chinese team is once again not on the roster. I’m sure Chinese viewers are simmering with a nameless anger. In my view, we should learn from President Xi. He started with a passionate enthusiasm for football, and now he is completely lying flat. Because regarding our national football team, I can’t be sure how much luck is involved. Why has President Xi become completely indifferent to football? The high‑profile media The Economist recently published an article with a very straightforward title, “Why China is so bad at football?”
This question has been asked by Chinese fans for fifteen years, and the answer remains inconclusive. The Economist’s sports reporter Mark Dryer provides a clue, pointing the problem to top‑level design and the long‑standing way China has promoted football. In plain language, the answer given by the report is that it’s all President Xi’s fault. In today’s episode we will slowly unpack the article’s conclusions, to see whether Dryer is the naive child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who unintentionally spoke the truth, or whether external hostile forces are constantly trying to blame everything on our great leader.
China is one of the world’s most heavily censored countries. Yet there is one institution, one industry that has been allowed to be criticized for twenty years: the Chinese Football Association and the national football team. As a result, personalities like “Big‑Eyed Brother” Li Chengpeng, Dong Lu and other star football journalists have emerged, freely cursing Chinese football. As long as you stay within the limits, it is safe. For example, if you insult national team players, you are targeting a few high‑salary athletes, which carries no political meaning. The CFA, although a child of the General Administration of Sport, still bears the label of a social organization, not a party or government agency, so criticizing it is like criticizing a civil society group, which is permitted.
“Money‑driven football” is a term used to criticize a commercial phenomenon, pointing at real‑estate giants like Evergrande and greedy capitalists—no problem there. Programmer Li Tie was officially labeled as a negative example, and criticizing him aligns with the central anti‑corruption propaganda. These targets together form a complete list of what can be safely criticized about Chinese football. As long as the allusions do not cross the line, the authorities have been tolerant in recent years.
At the same time, these incisive sarcastic remarks also allow the public to vent their dissatisfaction with the system, the economy, and life, serving as another pressure valve—why not use it? Before this World Cup kicked off, on May 31, The Economist published this sports commentary. If it were inside the Great Firewall, it would have definitely crossed the red line for reporting on Chinese football. First, let’s see how it argues that Chinese football is so terrible because of President Xi. It doesn’t simply say that Xi Jinping likes football, so Chinese football fails. Its reasoning is more sophisticated: the core is that the governance style of the Xi era was applied to football, turning the sport from a professional activity into a political project.
The author’s logical chain consists of ten steps, and I have performed a complete fact‑check here to prevent the wild rumors of hostile Western forces. The first step starts with a contrast. The 2026 World Cup will expand to 48 teams, and Asia’s slots will double from 4.5 to 8.5—eight direct spots and one inter‑confederation playoff place, an unprecedented boon for Asian football. By any ordinary reasoning, China should be a beneficiary, but the result? China finished bottom of Group C in the third‑stage Asian qualifiers.
Looking at the Group C results, China lost its opening away match 0‑7 to Japan—the biggest single‑match defeat in World Cup qualifying history and the worst loss to Japan in Chinese football history. You can’t bully the stronger side, but you can bully the weaker, right? On September 10, in Dalian, China lost 1‑2 at home to Saudi Arabia after a comeback, and striker Zhang Yuning cried on camera after the match. After all ten rounds of the third‑stage qualifiers, China recorded two wins, one draw, and seven losses, finishing bottom of Group C. The top two in the group qualified directly for the World Cup: Japan with 20 points, Australia with 13 points. The third and fourth places entered the fourth‑stage playoffs: Saudi Arabia with 10 points, Indonesia with 9 points, Bahrain with 6 points, and China sixth.
According to the rules, China did not even reach the fourth stage. The six teams that did advance were Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Indonesia. Jules highlighted three names that went farther than China: Oman, Indonesia, and Palestine. Oman has a population of five million—smaller than a Chinese prefecture‑level city—and a GDP of about $110 billion, roughly the size of a medium‑sized Chinese city. Such a country appeared in Group B of the third‑stage qualifiers and advanced to the fourth stage. But Jules singled out Palestine for discussion. Palestine finished fifth in Group B of the third‑stage qualifiers.
Since the October 2023 outbreak of the Israel‑Hamas war, the Palestinian Football Association’s home matches have been scheduled by the AFC in neutral countries such as Qatar, Jordan, and Kuwait on a rotating basis. In all ten rounds of the third‑stage qualifiers, Palestine never played a true home game. Gaza‑based players had to travel to Egypt or Jordan for training camps, while West Bank players had to pass Israeli checkpoints. Chinese fans often talk about “home‑field advantage,” yet Palestine went fourteen months without a single home match.
It was such a team that, on March 25, 2025, in the third‑stage qualifiers, played away against Iraq and pulled off a 2‑1 upset, sending the former Asian Cup champion Iraq to third place. A national team that has lived under constant conflict, never had a true home stadium, and must train through checkpoint inspections managed to overturn Iraq while Chinese fans endlessly debate why a nation of 1.4 billion cannot produce eleven decent players. The first step of the reasoning therefore elevates the problem from “the national team lost again” to “Xi’s football project failed under the most favorable conditions.”
The second step: the Great Hall of the People. In Dyer’s second step, the line of responsibility is traced back to Xi Jinping himself. On July 4, 2011, in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, then Vice President Xi Jinping met with South Korean Democratic Party leader Sun He‑gwi. At the end of the meeting, Sun presented Xi with a football signed by Park Ji‑sung. Xi immediately said, “My three wishes are for China to appear in the World Cup, to host the World Cup, and to win the World Cup.”
That year, the Chinese men’s national team was ranked 73rd in the world and had just changed coaches. Xinhua News Agency, Xinhuanet, and Phoenix Net all issued press releases that day. The next day, Guangzhou football reporter Zhao Zhen wrote an analysis piece interpreting those three wishes as short‑term, medium‑term, and long‑term goals: appearance in the near term, hosting in the medium term, and winning in the long term. This was the first time since the founding of the People’s Republic of China that senior CCP leadership had paid such concentrated attention to the football project.
A little earlier, in October 2009, Xi Jinping, then Vice President, visited Germany and was presented with a number 10 jersey of the Leverkusen football team at Bayer. He told the Germans that after the Olympics, China had made a decision: since we can win gold medals in other sports, we must also resolve to excel in football. However, this will take a long time; the Olympics had just ended a year ago, and he set a tone for football—this is a national decision, not a personal hobby.
In February 2012, he visited Ireland; in Dublin, at the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association, Xi stepped onto the field and demonstrated a few foot skills. Xinhua reporter Zhang Duo captured that famous photo. In the same month, during his U.S. visit, he met David Beckham in a private box at an NBA game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Phoenix Suns. These images share a common point: they occurred before Xi came to power. By the time of the 18th Party Congress in November 2012, he formally became General Secretary. Five months later, in March 2013, he became President of China.
The political roots of Chinese football were already laid before Xi officially took power. At the moment the three wishes were announced, he was still Vice President. All subsequent events—the 50‑point plan, the influx of money, naturalized players, the anti‑corruption storm in the football association—naturally unfolded from the July 4, 2011 meeting. Dyer’s assessment is that this was not an ordinary fan’s wish; it was the political source of later Chinese football policy. In Chinese discourse there is a more precise term: this is not a wish, it is an imperial decree.
The third step, the 50‑point plan, was Dyer’s third‑stage inference in 2015. On March 8, 2015, the State Council General Office issued the "Overall Plan for the Reform and Development of Chinese Football" with fifty points, approved by the CCP Central Committee and the State Council. It is a document implementing the Party’s decisions, with the Party leading and the State Council following. Opening the original plan, the most critical sentence in Chapter Two, Basic Principles, reads: combine the national system with market mechanisms.
Translating this political boilerplate into plain language: the market mechanism must serve the national system. Why interpret it this way? Look at the clauses that follow, and you’ll see a plan that appears to decouple the football association from the bureaucracy but actually binds it even tighter. For example, the plan emphasizes that the football association is a social organization, not a government agency. Article 5 states that the Chinese Football Association is separated from the General Administration of Sport and has autonomy in internal institutional arrangements. Article 6 says the association has no administrative rank.
However, in the implementation section, the plan calls for establishing an inter‑ministerial joint conference system for football reform and development, and for local governments to place football reform on their important agenda. In plain terms, this means local governments must treat football as a performance‑assessment item. If it were truly a decoupling plan, the implementation mechanism would free football from bureaucracy, but instead it ties football even more closely to the state’s bureaucratic system.
Two years after the plan’s rollout, administrative and financial resources arrived. In early 2017, the English Premier League began sounding alarms; Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger and Chelsea manager Antonio Conte publicly expressed concerns that Chinese league money could overwhelm Europe. In an article, Zhuo Er highlighted this issue: European top coaches publicly worried about the financial power of the Chinese league, mainly because the money came from real‑estate developers.
The massive capital poured into the Chinese Super League in recent years has not come from football‑industry backgrounds. Evergrande, Wanda, Suning, Hexi Fortune, Greenland, Fosun, Shanghai SIPG, Henan Jianye—behind these names are almost entirely real‑estate firms or other capital‑intensive industries that rely heavily on government approvals. There is an old saying in Chinese official circles: "If the top likes something, the bottom will follow even more." The real‑estate sector is the most dependent on official‑business relations among all industries. From land acquisition, planning, floor‑area ratio, to bank financing, pre‑sale permits, and inter‑province expansion, each step requires the nod of local party and government officials. The core survival logic of a leading real‑estate company lies not in how well it builds houses, but in how well it manages its relationships with officials.
The daily work of these developers essentially involves gauging the leadership’s intentions, political trends, and directives. Whatever sector the top leader publicly focuses on becomes the next round of political investment. Before the 2015 plan was released, Xi had repeatedly expressed his interest in football in many public appearances, as mentioned earlier. This is a rare, sustained public display of personal interest among the CCP’s top leaders over many years.
Chinese real estate companies naturally received this signal, so from the moment the 2015 plan was implemented, leading developers rushed in: Evergrande, Wanda, Suning, Greenland, R&F, and China Fortune Land Development. What you see is not an independent business decision, but a collective reaction triggered by the same signal source. These investments are not market behavior but political investments. They are not investing in football projects, but in the gaze of the top leader behind the projects!
The profit mechanism is also straightforward: the better the team's performance, the more camera shots from the chairman's box, and the more images of investors and local party and government officials together, the more political exposure, and the more bank credit, inter‑province expansion, and policy approval conveniences. This is the real financial logic of money‑driven football. On paper, the football club's losses are actually a political deposit of the developer’s relationship with officials—the more they lose, the more they deposit.
Understanding this mechanism makes everything that follows fall into place. Evergrande started its Guangzhou football club in 2010, with Xu Jiayin pouring massive funds. After the 2015 plan was released, Evergrande, Suning, China Fortune Land Development, and Shanghai SIPG entered one after another, the CSL salary cap was broken, and foreign player wages reached top‑European levels. Hulk, Oscar, Teixeira, and Ramirez—players of main‑team caliber in Europe—were poached by the CSL.
Abroad, Chinese capital bought AC Milan, Inter Milan, Atlético Madrid, Birmingham, Aston Villa, and Southampton—a list so long it’s hard to remember. During the period when AC Milan was under Chinese control, Italian media called it the “Red‑Black China era.” Drayer defined this stage in the original text as opening the floodgates. The logic chain: a wish was voiced in 2011, institutionalized in 2015, and capital smelled the political signal, rushed in, and the flood began.
In the fourth step of his analysis, Dryer gives his most crucial diagnosis: the problem is not excess but control. Chinese fans curse everything as excessive—money‑burning, planning, foreign‑player wages, FA corruption. Dryer says these are misdiagnoses; excess is only a symptom, control is the deeper cause. Breaking down control, Dryer offers three clues: first, corruption scandals. He writes that when the 2026 CSL season started, more than half the clubs were penalized for match‑fixing, gambling, and corruption, some even starting with negative points. He highlights a detail: Tianjin had played ten rounds and its points were still negative.
The image is vivid—after ten matches, they are climbing from negative points, not from zero. Second, political interference: Dryer’s exact words are that officials who constantly try to intervene in football cause damage no less than corruption. Third, top‑down football philosophy. Dryer’s abstract statement will be explained in steps five and six.
Putting these three together, Dryer’s diagnostic logic is: money itself is not the disease. Italy, the Premier League, and La Liga have all burned money; Serie A in the Baggio era called itself a “mini World Cup,” the Premier League led global transfer spending for a decade—spending is normal in football. China’s peculiarity is not how much money is spent, but how it is allocated.
Corruption, political interference, and top‑down control all point to one thing: the industry operates not by football logic but by bureaucratic logic. Whether a player makes the national team depends not only on skill but also on who is pulling the strings. Former Zob Ahan chairman Tian Xudong said in a CCTV anti‑corruption documentary, “When I saw the national team list that day, my face turned red. I knew our players couldn’t make it, not a single one.”
Whether a head coach can be promoted depends not only on tactical ability but also on whether they can assemble a few bribery chains. Li Tie bribed the then‑FA secretary‑general Liu Yi with one million yuan in 2019 to become head coach of the national team selection. This is the concrete form of Dryer’s “control” in China: not too much administration, but administration reshaping the football industry into its own image. The more money there is, the larger the resources this administrative logic can mobilize, and the deeper the distortion. Thus excess and control are not separate causes; excess is the result of control.
Step five, amateurs lead professionals. Dryer’s original text again points out President Xi. Under Mr. Xi, football became a political project, complete with targets, slogans, and official directives. In Xi Jinping’s new era, football is no longer just a sport but has been incorporated into a top‑down political engineering, with metrics, slogans, documents, and administrative orders. Dryer’s two specific observations are: first, the Chinese Football Association is in fact accountable to the State Sports Administration; second, football has been assigned targets, slogans, and official directives.
For the first point, let’s look at the 2015 “Fifty‑Point Plan,” which clearly states that the Chinese Football Association is decoupled from the State Sports Administration. Ten years later, we examine the actual operation. In December 2024, the Intermediate People's Court of Xianning City, Hubei Province, tried the Li Tie case, facing a legal technical question: does the national team head coach count as a state employee? The prosecution said yes, applying the bribery law for state officials, with a maximum penalty of death; the defense said no, applying the bribery law for non‑state officials, with a maximum penalty of over ten years or life imprisonment.
The fundamental difference is the maximum possible sentence. The court ultimately accepted the defense’s view, classifying Li Tie as a non‑state employee; the case involved about 120 million yuan, five crimes were combined, resulting in a twenty‑year prison sentence. At that moment, legal language fulfilled the promise of the 2015 plan. The association is a social organization, the national team head coach is not a state employee, so the sentencing standard is lower. Yet in the same judgment, former Chinese Football Association chairman Chen Xuyuan, involved in 8.103 million yuan, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Former deputy director of the State Sports Administration Du Zhaocai was sentenced to fourteen years at first instance. The deputy director of the State Sports Administration, the association chairman, and the national team head coach each received three different legal status determinations, but their prior personnel decision‑making authority was effectively linked along a single line. The source of this line is the State Sports Administration, whose source is the State Council, and the source of the State Council is the CCP Central Committee.
In name, the Chinese Football Association is decoupled from the State Sports Administration, but in practice, when the deputy director of the State Sports Administration falls, the association chairman follows, and the national team head coach follows—a complete chain of subordination. Dyer’s article uses the term “meddlesome officials,” which in Chinese context has a more apt translation: amateurs leading professionals. On the surface, the Chinese Football Association is a social organization, a market‑oriented club, a professional league, but its skeleton remains the State Sports Administration, a ministerial coordination body, and performance assessment.
The second point is that Chinese football is covered by targets, slogans, and official orders. The 2015 plan set goals as follows: by 2025, there will be 20,000 specialized school‑based football programs nationwide, a campus football population of 30 million, fifty youth training centers, and 60,000 community football fields. These are not football goals but performance metrics. Local government KPIs now include a football assessment: a province must build a certain number of specialized schools, a city must build a certain number of community fields. These are not about teaching players how to play, but about filling forms, reporting data, and meeting numbers.
Football has been transformed into an administrative task that can be reported, assessed, submitted, and reconciled.
Step six, overtaking on the curve. In the sixth step, Dryer draws a comparison that is hard for Chinese people to refute: China can mass‑produce high‑quality electric vehicles. That’s harder with footballers. China can mass‑produce high‑quality electric vehicles, but producing football players is much more difficult. This is Dryer’s line drawing the boundary of China’s governance logic. What China excels at is infrastructure construction and electric‑vehicle production, which imply various large‑scale national projects, because these industries share common traits: they can be standardized, scaled, regulated, and processed.
For example, producing ten thousand electric vehicles and producing ten electric vehicles follows the same process, just a replication of that process. China's governance excels at taking such replicable processes to the extreme. The same applies to Olympic events: weightlifting, diving, table tennis, badminton—these are things whose logic can be quantified and mass‑produced. Weight categories, movement breakdowns, training duration, nutritional intake, and various technical details—all of these sports can be quantified and repeated. Therefore China can win gold medals, rank at the top of the world, even dominate, in these events. But football is not on that list.
Joy said: "Successful football cultures are usually messy, local, and organic. They depend on children playing informally, community clubs taking root, and talent rising gradually through a pyramid of interconnected leagues." Successful football cultures are chaotic, local, and organic. They rely on children playing informally in the community, community clubs rooting themselves in neighborhoods, and talent climbing slowly through a pyramid‑shaped league system.
Then he wrote the sharpest line of the whole piece: "Football thrives precisely where authority lets go, in communities that the system does not naturally tolerate." This sentence is no longer just a comment on football; it reads like a metaphor for Chinese politics. It is similar to Li Chengpeng’s scathing football commentary back in the day, a thinly veiled criticism.
Argentinian football grows in the slums, Brazilian football on the streets, British football in the working‑class pub culture, Spanish football amid the regional identities of Catalonia and the Basque Country. These are communities that the system does not naturally tolerate—they are diverse, spontaneous, uncontrollable, and sometimes even anti‑system. Chinese governance, on the contrary, turns the uncontrollable into controllable, the spontaneous into planned, the diverse into uniform.
This is not a problem unique to China, but Chinese governance amplifies it to the extreme. The Chinese‑style investment actually harms football. The more seriously you run it, the harder you push, the deeper you damage the soil where football could naturally grow. In this step, Dryer offers no aggressive language, but Chinese officials find it hard to refute because to do so they would have to prove that a nation‑wide system can produce football, and that argument has been falsified by practice over the past fourteen years.
Dyer’s seventh‑step deduction crosses out President Xi’s three wishes from 2011 one by one. Wish one: qualify for the World Cup; in the 2026 World Cup qualification, Group C finishes sixth and is eliminated. In 2002, the Chinese squad played three matches, scored zero goals, and conceded nine. Dyer adds a note that this was called the so‑called "golden generation." By the next World Cup in 2030, Asia still has only 8.5 slots; at the current level, the Chinese team would need to replace a generation or two of coaches, a generation or two of players, and rebuild a youth‑training system. Dyer judges that at least another four‑year cycle is required.
Wish two: win the World Cup. Dyer’s original words: this wish "can safely be ejected into orbit." It is a sharply satirical economic‑type expression, literally meaning the wish can be safely launched into outer space. A reasonable Chinese rendering would be: as for winning the championship, it’s as easy as riding a bicycle to outer space. The sarcasm is strong, but it isn’t exaggerated. A team that has missed six consecutive World Cups, is ranked 94th in the world and 15th in Asia, talking about winning the tournament belongs to a different time dimension.
Wish three: host the World Cup, the most complex. Jair even did the math. In June 2017, FIFA President Gianni Infantino met Xi Jinping in Beijing; they discussed when China would host a World Cup. Chinese state media at the time even speculated 2030 or 2034. However, FIFA’s later bidding results awarded the 2030 World Cup to Morocco, Portugal and Spain, plus three special opening matches in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. The 2034 World Cup rights went to Saudi Arabia. Following FIFA’s inter‑continental rotation practice, China would not be eligible until at least 2042.
Dray calculates a timeline: the year 2042, Xi Jinping is eighty‑nine, right near the end of his sixth five‑year term. This isn’t a joke about age; it’s saying Xi has incorporated football into his personal political wish, but the actual timetable has completely run out of his political cycle. The wish was voiced in 2011, the first goal – qualifying for the World Cup – completely failed in 2026. The third goal – hosting the World Cup – would not be possible until at least 2042, and what will become of the wish‑maker himself by then? Football’s own logic does not follow a leader’s timetable, even if you are "one‑man supremacy."
If the seventh step is to settle the accounts, the eighth step is for Dyer to show how Xi himself views the ledger, and the answer is a cold‑handed approach. Dyer gives a detail: in 2024, England’s Vinícius (sic) visited China again, and this time Xi did not meet him personally; he was received by a deputy director of the State Sports Administration. Dyer’s original wording was, "A fair reflection of football's diminished status in China's political priorities," which is a true depiction of football’s downgraded standing in China’s political priorities.
In seven years, the reception dropped from the President himself to a deputy director of the sports bureau – this is not a minor protocol matter! It is Xi himself using the most direct way to tell the outside world that he no longer wants to endorse this political project. Reception of a leader‑level figure by the CCP is extremely sensitive. An international organization head such as the FIFA president should normally be received by a national leader or a vice‑premier level official; being received by a deputy director publicly signals that the issue no longer belongs to the highest level of the state agenda.
This passage is written very restrained by Dryer, but Chinese viewers should understand it at a glance. The political peak of Chinese football was in 2017; since then the reception standards have been on a downward trajectory. He implies that football has turned from a strategic interest in the Xi era into a political liability. Xi has not publicly admitted the failure of this political project, but he has silently withdrawn investment. That is why the scene at the beginning of the program appears: in 2023, when Xi met with Thai leaders, he himself expressed a lack of confidence in Chinese football.
Dray’s ninth step continues the analysis concerning broadcasting rights. A month before the 2026 World Cup kickoff, China Central Television had not yet finalized a broadcasting rights agreement with FIFA; finally, in mid‑May the deal was signed. Dray reports the figure at roughly $60 million, only one‑fifth of FIFA’s original asking price. Placing these two numbers side by side provides a reference point. Let’s look at the 2018 Russian World Cup: CCTV’s broadcasting rights purchase cost, according to multiple media reports, was close to $300‑$400 million. The 2022 Qatar World Cup purchase cost remained high, as the Chinese market was then seen as FIFA’s most important Asian growth engine.
This year, FIFA’s initial asking price was about $300 million, yet the final price was only $60 million. This is not ordinary commercial bargaining; it is a political signal. China’s official media, China Central Television, is not an ordinary TV station; it reports directly to the Central Propaganda Department, and its broadcasting rights budget is a national‑level budget. A negotiation that cuts a three‑hundred‑million deal down to sixty‑million cannot be decided solely by commercial departments; it must involve higher‑level directives. Other countries spend three hundred million to watch others play; this is no longer entertainment consumption, it is essentially a public self‑humiliation.
Cutting it to $60 million means we are buying a symbolic slice, a token purchase, but no longer making a large investment in the project. This is a political ledger beyond the commercial one, implying that Chinese officials’ enthusiasm for the World Cup is waning, and the government no longer wishes to pay a premium for an event that has no Chinese team and could expose the failure of Chinese football.
Dryer’s final step yields the headline quote of this sports commentary: "A decade ago, Chinese officials treated football as a strategic industry. Today, it is closer to a reputational liability." Ten years ago, football was a strategic industry in the eyes of the Chinese government; ten years later it has become a political liability that continuously drains the nation’s image.
Strategic industry and reputation liability, this is the same thing qualified at two different points in time. Ten years ago, football was a strategic industry, meaning that investing in it yielded returns—economic returns, political returns, national image returns, and even leaders' performance returns; today it is a reputation liability, meaning that investing in football has a reverse effect—the more you invest, the more exposure you get, and the more exposure, the more visible the failures.
Dryer gave a very precise explanation: even if China were to obtain the World Cup hosting rights, given its political and economic strength, this is the most likely of Xi Jinping’s three wishes to be realized. However, a perfectly organized Chinese World Cup, as long as the Chinese team suffers crushing defeats in every match, global public opinion will remember not the organizational capability but the failure of football.
For Xi-style politics, a project that cannot bring glory but instead creates humiliation is no longer worth promoting loudly. Dreyer’s entire reasoning reaches a logical closure here. My final conclusion is that this article’s real argument is not that Chinese people play football poorly, but that Xi incorporated football into the national strategy, the national strategy turned football into a bureaucratic project, which attracted capital speculation, power rent‑seeking, and formalistic metrics, and football is precisely the least suitable for such top‑down control.
In the end, Chinese football fails not because no one cares, but because the highest authority over‑emphasized it in the wrong way. Returning to the question at the start of this episode: is this senior sports reporter Drier the little boy in the emperor’s new clothes, or a hostile force spewing nonsense? After my fact‑checking, his reasoning is based on facts. So the question arises: China has so many insightful football journalists and veteran fans, why does no one point out that the emperor’s new clothes are just air?
Of course, Chinese fans are not blind. As long as they are not “positive energy” netizens or those who trample others like a sewing machine, every true‑hearted fan has a sense of balance and knows, to some extent, the right and wrong here. Due to the environment, they cannot openly criticize the central authorities and must keep their thoughts to themselves. This is the theme of this episode, which I’ll call: Chinese fans dare not speak.