Top Chinese soccer league bumped off TV

November 18, 2008

BEIJING (AP)—The top Chinese soccer games have been bumped from national TV because of on-field fighting at a recent game and reports likening some players to martial arts experts.

Jiang Heping, head of sports for CCTV—China’s government-run broadcaster— said he’d prefer to show foreign games. He has accused some players in the China Super League of lacking “professional ethics” following a scuffle last week between clubs from Beijing and the neighboring city of Tianjin.

After the game, fans attacked the bus of the visiting Tianjin team.

Dong Hua, spokesman for the Chinese Football Association, on Tuesday dismissed what happened, saying it was part of the “fierce competition” as the season nears the end.

“But we have rules and we’ll deal with everything according to the rules,” Dong said.

His opinion was challenged by a recent headline in the Beijing Evening News, which asked: “When will Chinese football stop bringing shame?” The China News Agency likened Super League games to “a Kungfu movie” and some players to “martial arts heroes.”

The Beijing Olympics were widely regarded as a sports success. However, that is not the case with soccer.

“The state of Chinese football at the moment makes everyone feel bitter,” Jiang told the Titan sports newspaper. “If it goes on like this, it’s in danger of being thoroughly destroyed.”

The famed state-run sports machine, which produced 51 Olympic gold medals three months ago, has failed to produce a single marquee soccer player. This nation of 1.3 billion is No. 98 in the world rankings, just ahead of Georgia (pop. 4.6 million) and Barbados (pop. 280,000).

The hallmark of the government-run Super League has been chronic mismanagement, match-fixing scandals and on-field violence.

“In football, the issue of violence is always present,” said Rowan Simons, an Englishman and 20-year resident of China, who has worked as a TV analyst in Chinese. “China is not unusual in player fights. But it does seem to be more endemic here.”

China’s national team was knocked out of 2010 World Cup in Asian qualifying five months ago, failing to make the last 10 in continental competition. The only time China qualified for the World Cup was in 2002. It lost all three games and failed to score.

“The Chinese have tried to replicate the elite level of football they see in Europe without seeing that underneath it is a huge infrastructure of community clubs which have been there for generations,” Simons said. “You can’t create an elite model of football without a grass-roots model.”

Still, China hopes to bid for the 2018 or 2022 World Cup, and could be the leading contender.

By STEPHEN WADE, AP Sports Writer

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