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Schlagwort: China

What the NBA incident says about the expectations and strategies of Chinese politics

What the NBA incident says about the expectations and strategies of Chinese politics


This blog deals primarily with developments in Chinese football. However, it is worth taking a look beyond the horizon from time to time in order to better understand specific contexts and derive implications for one’s own profession and occupation.

Recently, there was an incident in the American National Basketball Association (NBA) that attracted a lot of attention. What happened? The general manager of the NBA-team Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, tweeted on October 4 “Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong”.

Flashback: The Hong Kong protests in 2019 initially formed against a bill by the Hong Kong government, which would allow the extradition of fugitive offenders and convicts to mainland China. The relatively small protests increasingly developed into pro-democracy mass protests, which were publicly directed against the authority of the Chinese central government. The situation escalated as protesters and security authorities began to resort to violence.

Back to the tweet: Morey’s public support of the protests is so sensitive, not only because his club and the NBA have signed lucrative commercial agreements and formed partnerships with mainland China, but also because former Chinese NBA star and current official of the Chinese Communist Party Yao Ming played for the Houston Rockets.

Basketball is not just any other sport in China, but perhaps the most popular game according to a variety of indicators such as broadcasting time, practice across the country, online and offline media reach and levels of commercialisation, even ahead of football. In 2017, for instance, Zhou et al. (2017: 82) wrote that the NBA “has had remarkable success in the Chinese market. From the perspective of sport competition or marketing operations, the NBA’s achievement in China provides a model for other overseas sport leagues”.

However, this success as being considered a “model” for other actors in the realm of sports might be over now, since the reactions to this tweet came promptly and intensely. The spokesperson of the Chinese Consulate General in Houston announced, for instance, in an official statement that they “are deeply shocked by the erroneous comments on Hong Kong made by Mr. Daryl Morey [and] expressed strong dissatisfaction with the Houston Rockets”. Furthermore, the representative urged the NBA team “to correct the error and take immediate concrete measures to eliminate the adverse impact”. What exactly this “correction” meant was unclear at first. But later it was revealed that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver was allegedly asked by the Chinese government to fire Daryl Morey. His answer was: “there’s no chance that’s happening […] there’s no chance we’ll even discipline him”.

Moreover, China’s state television broadcaster CCTV announced that it would suspend broadcasts of the NBA pre-season games and review all agreements with the NBA. Consequently, CCTV did not air the season opener between the reigning champion Toronto Raptors and the New Orleans Pelicans. And, Chinese sponsors such as Mengniu Diary, Anta Sports, and Ctrip.com terminated their deals with the NBA.

After receiving the first negative reactions, Morey deleted his tweet quickly and wrote in response, “I did not intend my tweet to cause any offense to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China”, but the emotional machinery had already been set in motion, and the damage was done. He further added: “I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives”. Michael Bass, the Chief Communication Officer of the NBA, distanced himself from Morey’s statements: “While Daryl has made it clear that his tweet does not represent the Rockets or the NBA, the values of the league support individuals’ educating themselves and sharing their views on matters important to them”, meaning that Morey is allowed to form and express his personal ideas and opinions.

However, in Chinese social media, the NBA adopted a slightly different position, stating that they were “extremely disappointed in the inappropriate comment”. The assessment of NBA star LeBron James was similar: “I don’t want to get into a… feud with Daryl Morey but I believe he wasn’t educated about the situation at hand and he spoke […] Just be careful what we tweet… even though, yes, we do have freedom of speech. But there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too”. Sometime later, the first LeBron James jerseys burned in Hong Kong. James’ comments had infuriated many protesters in Hong Kong as they were interpreted as proof that he supported China.

These statements were considered by some people in the US as a Kowtow (磕头, ketou) – a withdrawal from freedom of speech to minimize their own financial losses. For instance, Ted Cruz, the Senator of Texas, tweeted that “[a]s a lifelong @HoustonRockets fan, I was proud to see @dmorey call out the Chinese Communist Party’s repressive treatment of protestors in Hong Kong. Now, in pursuit of big $$, the @nba is shamefully retreating”. He further added: “We’re better than this; human rights shouldn’t be for sale & the NBA shouldn’t be assisting Chinese communist censorship”.

A few years ago, there was a similar incident in football. In 2017, the German Football Association (DFB) signed a series of cooperation agreements with Chinese partners. Following Xi Jinping’s inauguration as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, a “comprehensive” (全面, quanmian) football development strategy was launched in China between 2014 and 2016, including four far-reaching reform programmes. The strengthening of cooperation in the domain of football between the Federal Republic of Germany and the People’s Republic of China can be traced back to a proposal made by Chancellor Angela Merkel to President Xi Jinping during her state visit to China in June 2016.

Part of this cooperation agreement was that the Chinese U-20 national team would play against German fourth tier teams to prepare for the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2020. The German teams were to receive €15,000 per game in return. But already after the first match the cooperation was terminated. What happened? After Tibetan human rights activists rolled out Tibet flags during the game, the Chinese players left the pitch in the middle of the first half. After a 25-minute break, the activists had to remove their flags. The incident triggered a debate about freedom of expression in Germany. A senior DFB official commented on the incident as follows: “We cannot ban protests, there is freedom of expression. But we also want to be good hosts. In this respect, we are not happy about these events”. Lu Kang, spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, responded to the incident that the Chinese government is opposing “separatist, anti-China or terrorist activities”.

The Chinese government asked the DFB to ban “anti-China” statements from sporting venues. However, the DFB could not guarantee this. Subsequently, Chinese sponsors in Germany are reported to have announced the termination of collaborations and contracts. When the cooperation was about to fail, the then DFB President Reinhard Grindel visited Beijing to calm the emotions. However, he was not even welcomed at the gates. He therefore had to return to Germany empty-handed.

In comparison, the NBA has much higher bargaining power than the DFB. The advantage of the NBA is that there is de facto no alternative basketball league that enjoys similar popularity in China. The situation is very different in the domain of football. There are enough alternatives to cooperate with well-known brands that compete for access to the lucrative Chinese market. China commentator Bill Bishop described the NBA’s favourable position as follows: “The NBA has leverage in China, if it works as a united front. PRC fans, sponsors, web sites and broadcasters can shun one team, but they can not and will not shun an entire league. Do you really think those fans are going to be satisfied watching CBA [China Basketball Association] games? There would be a social stability cost to banning the NBA in China. I am serious”. For the Chinese Communist Party, nothing stands above domestic social stability.

These incidents and developments illustrate one thing in particular – whether we like it or not – we live in a globalised and interconnected world, where reciprocal influences and interdependencies are increasingly becoming apparent. This means that China’s increased economic strength has a considerable influence on how people deal with their own values, belief systems, and patterns of behaviours. On the other hand, popular foreign (cultural) products and brands in China have an influence on Chinese society despite actively practiced censorship.

The Chinese government expects from its partners in other countries that they protect their interests and proceed with a similar severity against those who deviate from the political line in Beijing. Financial incentives are used deliberately as a strategy to punish perceived misconduct and reward loyal advocates. Foreign stakeholders are thereby played off against each other as far as possible. The formation of common positions towards China is thus made more difficult – not only in the context of sport, but also in other economic and political fields. The Leninist party dictatorship in China seems to be capable of effectively creating an extensive homogenisation of interests and coordinating a corresponding synchronisation of commercial behaviour, which favours this strategic approach and ensures the assertion of Chinese interests in other countries.

Publication: “Chinese Football in the Era of Xi Jinping: What do Supporters Think?”

Publication: “Chinese Football in the Era of Xi Jinping: What do Supporters Think?”

Chinese football is a largely neglected research object in social science research on China, although Chinese president Xi Jinping himself stated that „[f]ootball is the most popular sport in the world and there are over 100 million football fans in China alone“. Recently, however, the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs published an article by Ilker Gündogan and Albrecht Sonntag called “Chinese Football in the Era of Xi Jinping: What do Supporters Think?”. The study aims to illustrate how the Chinese football community perceived the newly launched national football reform programmes in the People’s Republic of China.

The article starts by giving the reader a brief introduction to Chinese football history, explaining that, despite being very successful in other sports (especially individual sports), China has failed to reach the same level of competitiveness and success in football. The men‘s national football team has only once qualified for a FIFA World Cup and is struggling to catch up with the women‘s national team. Furthermore, corruption and fraud caused detrimental effects on the reputation and prominence of the Chinese football leagues. Even before Xi Jinping came to office as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, he has expressed a strong desire to change the poor state and lousy image of Chinese football. For instance, in 2011, he revealed his “three wishes for Chinese football”: to qualify for a World Cup, to host a World Cup, and finally to win a World Cup. And, after having taken office as president in 2013, the Chinese political leadership released a “comprehensive” national football development strategy in order to “improve physical health, enrich cultural life, promote the spirit of patriotism and collectivism, develop the sports industry” as well as to meet “the new popular expectations by realising the dream of becoming a powerful sporting nation”. To achieve these goals, a centralisation of national football governance structures was enforced by state authorities, meaning that “the political leadership of the PRC has shifted decision-making powers in Chinese football […] to an even higher level of authority; this, in turn, stresses the degree of importance attributed to football by China’s contemporary political leaders”.

The implications of football play an essential role in China‘s political efforts to develop “the people’s game”. Football today serves as a consolidator of national identity not only in China but also in many other countries. Historically, this facet has been especially highlighted in the context of European and Latin American communities, which means that the game’s propensity to serve as a stabiliser of national identity can be applied to many different “varieties of nationalism” around the globe. As Gündogan and Sonntag put it: Football was considered historically “as a mock confrontation of nations”, focusing on “territorial layout and battlefield terminology (‘attack,’ ‘defence,’ ‘wings,’ ‘shots,’ ‘captain,’ and the like) [that’s why different political] regimes were tempted to instrumentalise the game as a way of consolidating national identities”. It is therefore not too surprising that in particular national football teams “are heavily charged with symbolic value” and consequently “trigger profoundly nationalistic identification patterns based on feelings of belonging, perceived singularity, and national pride”.

A notable feature of this study is that, in comparison to some other studies on Chinese football, the results are not merely based on hypotheses, but provide original data. The authors created an online survey with 40 questions in order to examine the attitudes of Chinese football supporters, with particular emphasis laid on issues of nationalism and governance. The survey was disseminated via Chinese social media channels such as WeChat and Sina Weibo, and the responses of 2,499 survey participants from all over mainland China were taken into consideration. Some 1885 respondents completed all 40 questions.

The results suggest that “[g]iven the place that football tends to occupy in the lives of those who consider themselves ‘supporters,’ it is coherent that the survey participants felt concerned by a reform programme that is directly targeted at their passion and is thus likely to have an impact on their everyday lives”.

Although the survey confirms that most survey participants identify with the Chinese national team and emotionally react to certain symbolic elements and behaviours, only very few respondents are satisfied with the performance of the Chinese men’s national football team (1.6 per cent). Moreover, a significant 80 per cent of respondents expect that the Chinese men’s national team will not be able to overtake those of Japan and South Korea in the FIFA World Ranking over the next ten years.

Both in several media reports and the official documents, the personal preference and fondness of President Xi Jinping for “the beautiful game” were repeatedly emphasised. The survey participants were asked what, in their opinion, were the main motivations behind the reform and development efforts vis-à-vis Chinese football. The responses reveal that a large majority of respondents perceives the reforms as a response to a public demand (80 per cent) and an attempt to raise China’s soft power on the international level (59 per cent), very much in line with the officially stated goals in the reform programmes.

The complete article and survey questions can be found here (free access): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/186810261804700104

The market entry and retreat of Dalian Wanda Group in world football

The market entry and retreat of Dalian Wanda Group in world football

 

On 14th February 2018, Atlético de Madrid announced that its Chinese investor Dalian Wanda Group (DWG) has reached an agreement to sell 17 percent of its 20 percent stake in the Spanish football club for about US$ 50 million. According to the official statement, ‘The decision to divest is part of the global strategy of Dalian Wanda Group’. This strategic reorientation of the Chinese corporation marks a turning point in the international football business.

Chinese economic impact on world football

A few years ago, political reform policies in China to develop national football were followed by increased commercial activities and a high level of capital influx into world football. Several star players under contract at top European clubs were transferred to China for breathtaking amounts. Moreover, Chinese companies started to invest heavily in shares of top-tier European clubs like Manchester City (City Football Group) or acquired them all together, such as the emblematic pair of Internazionale Milan and AC Milan, as well as football-related service companies.

Source: FIFA Transfer Matching System

Regarding the spectacular player transfers to China, Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp made an interesting comparison. He said in an interview that footballers might go to China for the money, but people in (continental) Europe think the same logic applies to a move to England. Other well-known names of European football, such as Arsene Wenger and Antonio Conte, have not only voiced their concerns about these developments but have portrayed China as a ‘danger’ to European football. The ‘China Threat’ categorisation recalls the statements of the Donald Trump administration in the US, where China is considered not only a ‘whole-of-government threat, but as a whole-of-society threat’.

Wanda’s foray into the international football market

In 2015, DWG acquired a 20 percent stake in Atlético de Madrid, the third most successful club in Spanish football, behind Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, for US$ 52 million. A few weeks later the Chinese company purchased Infront Sports & Media AG, one of the leading sports marketing companies, for about US$ 1.2 billion.

According to Infront’s website, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) has appointed the company as the ‘exclusive sales representative for the distribution of Asian broadcast rights to the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups™ and all other FIFA Events 2015-2022 following an international tender process. The agreement covers 26 countries, including China, Hong Kong India, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand.’

The president and chief executive officer of Infront Sports & Media AG is Philippe Blatter, the nephew of former FIFA president Sepp Blatter. In May 2015, Wang Jianlin, the founder of DWG and, according to the ‘Hurun Rich List’ of 2017, one of the wealthiest person in China, and Phillipe Blatter attended the 65th FIFA Congress, where Sepp Blatter was re-elected as FIFA president.

A few days after Blatter’s electoral victory, federal prosecutors in the United States disclosed corruption cases of FIFA officials and persons associated with FIFA. Sepp Blatter was banned for six years by the FIFA ethics committee accordingly since he allegedly approved a payment of about US$ 2 million to Michel Platini, former president of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). Subsequently, UEFA General Secretary Gianni Infantino was elected as the new FIFA president in 2016.

The corruption allegations had the consequence that some FIFA-affiliated companies such Continental, Castrol, and Johnson & Johnson did not renew their sponsorship contracts. At the same time, DWG became the first Chinese top-level sponsor of FIFA. This agreement was the first commercial deal of Gianni Infantino in his function as FIFA president. On DWG’s website, it is indicated that with the strategic partnership between DWG and FIFA the Chinese company ‘will be better placed to play a role in the bidding process to host major football events such as the World Cup’. The hosting of the FIFA World Cup is one of the dreams of China’s President Xi Jinping.

In an open lecture at Harvard Business School, Wang Jianlin explained the reasons for investing in international football: ‘Our dream is to improve China’s sports industry by adapting to the development of the mainland’s economy and society… If Chinese companies don’t go through the globalisation phase, it’s hard for us to make China powerful or realise the Chinese Dream’. Beyond positioning sport, and football, as drivers of globalisation, this quote also demonstrates that the investment decisions of the corporation are justified by the policy expectations in the era of President Xi Jinping.

Nevertheless, the calculation of DWG did not work out, and the ‘dream’ became a nightmare for the Chinese company.

Wanda under investigation of China’s regulatory bodies

In December 2016, China’s National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Commerce, the People’s Bank of China and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) issued in a press release that regulatory bodies ‘pay close attention to the recent tendency of some irrational outward investment in the fields of real estate, hotels, cinemas, entertainment industry, and sports clubs.’ DWG has invested in all of these fields.

Source: Thomson Reuters

In March 2017, Pan Gongsheng, deputy governor of China’s central bank and director of SAFE, compared overseas mergers and acquisitions with ‘barbed roses’. He added that many investments in foreign football clubs were ‘irrational‘ since Chinese companies ‘borrowed large sums of money’ and had ‘already a high debt ratio’. In the same month, an American company announced that a proposed acquisition by DWG was cancelled. A few weeks later, Wang Jianlin explained that he was turning his attention back to domestic investments.

A few month later, the China Banking Regulatory Commission launched an investigation into the ‘systematic risk’ presented by some large corporations involved in overseas acquisitions, including DWG and other companies that invested in European football. As a result, shares in Wanda Film Holdings, a subsidiary of DWG, fell by 9.9 percent.

Prior to this, China’s central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan remarked that ‘The experience of the global financial crisis tells us that the first priority is to keep financial institutions healthy so that financial crises could be prevented. We cannot tolerate phenomena such as heavy leverage, low capital and non-performing loans.’ These political interventions may also be connected to the issue that capital outflows via overseas investments have a depreciating pressure on the Chinese currency and might reduce China’s foreign exchange reserves.

According to data released by China’s Ministry of Commerce, from January to June 2017, Chinese overseas investment in culture, sports and entertainment industry dropped by 82.5 percent, accounting for 1 percent of the total overseas investment.

In January 2018, Wang Jianlin promised that DWG will gradually repay all its overseas debt and will not ‘have any credit default anywhere in the world’. The sale of the shares in Atlético de Madrid is, therefore, part of a strategic reorientation of the Chinese company.

China-EU or EU-China Sports Diplomacy?

China-EU or EU-China Sports Diplomacy?

 

Earlier this month (December 2017), the team of China Football 8 was invited to participate in the ‘Seminar on Sport Diplomacy’ in Brussels. The seminar was organised by the Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture of the European Commission, as a follow-up to the High-Level Group on sports diplomacy set up in 2015 by Commissioner Tibor Navracsics in order to elaborate political initiatives and recommendations in this field. The group included active and former athletes, academics, think-tank and media representatives. In an interview with the think-tank ‘Sport et Citoyenneté‘, Mr Navracsics indicated that the High-Level Group’s work might lead to more coordinated efforts by the EU Member States to harness the potential of sport for diplomacy and ‘make the EU a stronger global actor.’

On November 2016, the General Secretariat of the Council issued its conclusions on sports diplomacy. Sport is considered ‘a possible tool in supporting intercultural, economic and political cooperation and understanding between nations and cultures’. Moreover, sport is assigned the ability to ‘shape perceptions in order to support reaching broader foreign policy goals’ and promoting values such as ‘fair play, equality, respect for diversity, integrity, discipline, excellence, friendship, tolerance and mutual understanding which bring different people and countries together.’ Projects related to sports diplomacy should be realised through the EU funding programmes in the area of EU External Relations as well as through the Erasmus+ programme.

Against the background of these developments, the big question is of course: what are the target countries? And within the framework of this blog, the obvious question is whether the People’s Republic of China (PRC) could be a target country or even a partner of EU sports diplomacy.

According to Professor Thierry Zintz, the Dean of the Faculty of Sports Sciences of the Université Catholique de Louvain and rapporteur of the High-Level Group, sport is a source of cultural soft power. This definition fits very well with the official statements of Mr Xi Jinping, President of the PRC. On October 2017, Mr Xi Jinping delivered a report at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) where he revealed that China’s political leadership will ‘speed up efforts to build China into a powerful sports nation’. To achieve this goal, the CPC ‘will strengthen people-to-people and cultural exchanges with other countries, giving prominence to Chinese culture while also drawing on other cultures, […] improve our capacity for engaging in international communication so as to tell China’s stories well, present a true, multi-dimensional, and panoramic view of China, and enhance our country’s cultural soft power.’

The concept of soft power has been used and abused in studies about China in recent years. The major problems are the imprecise contextualisation, wording, quantifying and application of this concept. Some argue it is no longer relevant in the context of sport mega-events. Nonetheless, the very vague derivation and interpretation of the concept is also used in the context of the developmental aspirations in Chinese football and the hosting of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games.

One month after Mr Xi Jinping’s speech at the 19th National Congress of the CPC, Mr Navracsics and Chinese Vice-Premier Mrs Liu Yandong met on the occasion of the 4th EU-China High-Level People-to-People Dialogue in Shanghai. In this context, the topic of sports was discussed for the first time.

However, the question remains whether China is a target of European sports diplomacy, or whether it is perhaps the other way round! The fact is that there are various cooperation opportunities associated with sports, such as in fields of health, governance, economics, education, etc. Sport in general, and football, in particular, have a multi-dimensional impact on human beings: they attract a lot of attention, trigger emotions and create a strong sense of belonging or rejection, have increasing economic weight, and immediate implications on public health. Sport is indeed a promising avenue for engaging in People-to-People dialogue not only on ‘high level’, but also between sportspeople and citizens.

It remains to be seen whether the diplomatic relations between the EU and China in this specific field will lead to mutual influence and exchange, beyond ‘soft-power’ posturing.

Seminar on Sport Diplomacy (1)

Seminar on Sport Diplomacy (2)

The influence of media on China’s “Soft Power”

The influence of media on China’s “Soft Power”

 

Academic debates about China’s “soft power” are controversial. Internationally renowned scientists such as Joseph Nye and David Shambaugh believe that many efforts of China’s central government aimed at accumulating cultural soft power had only a very limited return on its investments. But this may change now, thanks to the coverage of some influential non-Chinese media outlets.

Today, the Financial Times published an article titled “Beijing’s endgame: football with Chinese characteristics”. The article is mainly about the overdose of Chinese investments in English football clubs. It is argued that these investments are a response to President Xi Jinping’s football reforms, which are a means to boost China’s international influence.

But is this conclusion coherent? Are not the Chinese national team and the domestic league the key to increasing soft power? I’ve heard relatively little about German investors in foreign football clubs – even though the money is there. Nevertheless, football is a very important element of German soft power. The reason for this is obvious: the national team has been sustainably successful for decades and even more appreciated globally since the 2006 World Cup and the Klinsmann/Löw revolution.

In recent years, there has been an inflation of studies about Chinese soft power. Just because there are repeated scientific claims that China possesses (more or less) soft power, it does not mean that this is necessarily the case. From a scientific point of view, one major difficulty is already to quantify soft power. How exactly do you measure it?

What’s even more important (and not discussed in the FT article) is that the term “soft power” is interpreted differently by different scholars, especially in China. While the traditional understanding framed by Nye (1990) considers soft power mainly in the context of international relations, Chinese scholars and policy analysts also apply the concept to the context of domestic politics (Wang/Lu 2008: 445). That’s why we might miss the point in the soft power debates.

However, what I noticed recently is that the constant reporting of non-Chinese media – especially about Chinese football – has resulted in an increased awareness and interest in contemporary China’s popular culture.

What I mean by this is that the issue of Chinese soft power has shifted from a purely academic debate to a widely discussed topic in other fields like European football for example, which may have paradoxically led to China having actually more international influence and, consequently, more soft power.

Even now that you have spent your energy and time reading this text, it may be that I have influenced your perception of the capacity of Chinese soft power. Talking, writing, blogging about Chinese soft power may well turn out to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Where is China’s Nick Hornby?

Where is China’s Nick Hornby?

25 years ago, in September 1992, football changed. Not only through the launch of the Premier League and the Champions League, but also through the publication of a small autobiographical novel by an unknown author, which in a strange, certainly unintentional simultaneity, became the swan song of all these decades of traditional football that were now to be replaced by the Brave New World of postmodern football in all its splendour.

Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch did not invent anything: the entire vocabulary and set of behaviour patterns it relates were already well-known. But it introduced a different way of talking about the football addiction, a new narrative.

Fever Pitch is the monument to the ‘unknown supporter’. Many football lovers, of whatever level of education, recognised themselves in the bittersweet nostalgia of this both hilarious and sad account of what it means to be diagnosed football-virus-positive. There it was, all laid out before them in a funny, touching story: this helpless feeling of being emotionally imprisoned in the attachment to a football club, the stupid urge to keep on suffering weekend after weekend on windy and drenched terraces, the self-mocking despair about this stupid game’s totally disproportional impact on your daily life.

Hornby brought supporters comfort and relief, by activating and reformulating something they had never really lacked, but had been mostly unaware of: ironic distance.

Irony is based on a deep, shared understanding of an object, dissimulated behind apparent ignorance. It is an implicit agreement with one’s audience about the inadequacy of what is explicitly said. But irony is not cheap mockery of something that deserves contempt: it only works if the object of its derision is taken seriously in the first place.

Football is a case in point. Football-bashing is boring. But football irony can be truly funny. Football’s most-quoted definition – Bill Shankly’s ultimate sentence about it being much more than just a matter of life and death – is a wonderful illustration. The effect of humour in this ironic statement is mainly drawn from the fact that behind the obvious absurdity of the claim, there is a shared understanding that – ‘well, I hate to admit it, but let’s face it’ – it holds a kernel of truth. The life of a football lover is rife with moments that can, for fear of utter ridicule, only be openly referred to behind a veil of irony.

In a large social group, irony can only function if there is a shared (aesthetic) experience to which it can refer. This post, being published on a blog that is dedicated to football in China, therefore almost automatically raises the question to what extent it is possible to create, as intended by President Xi Jinping, a football nation from scratch, without the decades of accumulated understanding of the game and what it does to people.

In 1994, only two years after the release of Fever Pitch, Chinese football went professional. And as in so many other fields, China is taking the shortcut and jumping directly into postmodernity. Football has never been the country’s ‘national sport’, there seems to be no widely shared tradition of supportership, it does not seem to have played any role in processes of self-perception or identity formation.

Today, the government expresses the political will and mobilises the economic means to implement the immensely ambitious reform programmes and achieve, in record time, what must well be termed a ‘football revolution’ across the nation. Looking at China’s track record of performance over the last quarter century, there is hardly any doubt the market will continue to explode and, at one point, the massive effort in detection and training of talent will bear fruit.

What is strangely absent from all this ‘hyper-loop’ football, is the supporters themselves. What do we actually know about them, besides their level of brand recognition for Premier League clubs and readiness to purchase Bayern Munich jerseys? Do they love the game for having played it themselves or are they simply being educated into becoming the perfect consumers of global entertainment football? What do we know about the legends and myths of Chinese football, the stories that are handed on between generations, besides the claim – officially acknowledged by FIFA – to have invented the game around 4,500 years ago?

In other words: Where is China’s Nick Hornby? A simple question that entails that academic research about the contemporary Chinese football revolution should be accompanied by studies in literature and, ideally, some ethnographic field work among Chinese football fans. What does their collective memory look like? How strong can the roots of fandom be without a whole century punctuated by the reassuring rhythm of successive seasons and a shared canon of unforgettable highlights?

It’s not complicated to be a customer of today’s football industry. But as an individual socialised in Europe, I doubt I would be have any interest for it if I did not have that bittersweet Fever Pitch nostalgia for a time that is no more, will not come back, but generated a touching, sometimes ironic, lasting narrative.

What the Neymar transfer tells us about Football in China

What the Neymar transfer tells us about Football in China

 

Paris Saint-Germain signed Brazilian forward Neymar for a world record fee of 222 million euros from FC Barcelona. The football public went crazy and some people accused Neymar on social media of being immoral. Most people, however, forget that the greatest value of football is not money; it is attention.

Imagine if football would not receive worldwide attention, as it is nowadays. Do you believe that so many entrepreneurs would be willing to invest their money in football, where a large number of clubs generate no or very low financial returns compared to other industries? Probably there would be some benefactors who voluntarily sponsor their home teams. But would these enormous sums of money be spent on sponsorship and TV rights if football would not receive the attention of so many people? I don’t think so.

The irony of the Neymar transfer is that most people who are now terribly upset and angry about it will most likely turn on the TV when Neymar plays against his former colleagues in the Champion League.

Many people are unaware that football is, in fact, a made-up game that is invested with so much meaning that it becomes reality. It involves elaborate rituals, and the results of the competitions have substantial impact on the social, economic and political standing of both players and spectators. Without the global attention, the social, commercial and political impact of football would probably not be worth mentioning. In fact, football would have no effect at all if we did not believe it had an effect. But it has an enormous impact! This is the reason why football is “more than a game”.

Football is a “religion” that people usually join very early in life. Of course, there are people who convert only at advanced age from other sports to football, but according to a study of FREE (Football Research in Enlarged Europe) about 89 per cent of respondents (over 8,000 European football fans) stated in a survey that they started to be interested in playing and watching football before they were 12 years old. This means that football socialisation takes place at a very young age.

In 2015, China’s Ministry of Education included football on the physical education syllabus in all primary and secondary schools and made football a compulsory part of the national school curriculum. In contrast to many European countries, youth football should be developed mainly in schools and not in clubs. The basic idea behind these efforts is to popularise football in the Chinese public. Thus, a special programme called Campus Football should “develop excellent grassroots to provide a growth path from social football to professional football”.

But it’s not the party, it’s the people who really matter. The Chinese population plays a decisive role in the development of national football. A comprehensive development of national football in China cannot be performed without the voluntary decision of the Chinese public to pay attention to and participate in football-related activities. This is the power of attention. It is all the more surprising that the role of football communities are often underestimated in the public debates not only on Chinese football.

European Football Clubs Tour China

European Football Clubs Tour China

 

A lot of prominent European football clubs are currently in China. It’s summer break. The competitions in the European leagues have not yet started and the teams are preparing intensively for the coming season.

The weather is usually at this time of the year very hot and sticky in areas like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Tianjin and the time difference is an extra burden, especially for professional players. There is also the fact that European teams mainly play friendlies against each other, since the Chinese teams are in the middle of the season.

The question arises: Why are so many teams taking on the hardships to travel to China during their pre-season preparation?

China is the second largest economy in the world, it has now more than 100 cities of over 1 million residents, and after President Xi Jinping came into office in November 2012, three comprehensive reform programmes to develop football and sports in general in China have been issued. It is therefore only logical that actors of European football consider China first and foremost one of the most promising markets for their own business expansion.

Since 2015, the International Champions Cup (ICC) has been organising friendlies between European football clubs in China. LeTV, one of China’s largest online video companies, teamed up with RSE Ventures, Relevent Sports and Catalyst Media Group to bring ICC to China. According to ICC website, the corporation “is dedicated to full-dimensional premium European football experience for Chinese fans. As a world’s leading pre-season football tournament, ICC China brings along the top European football culture and football lifestyle in China”.

Is it really about bringing European football culture and football lifestyle to China? There is subsequently a more important question: what do they mean with “European football culture” and “football lifestyle”? And: can we even speak of European football clubs when three of the six participating teams are partly (Olympique Lyonnais, Inter Milan) or completely (AC Milan) owned by Chinese investors?

In the field of social sciences it is widely accepted that sport is a powerful facilitator, provider and resource for an array of identities. However, this does not mean that sport should be understood as some kind of self-sufficient social institutions or subsystem, but rather as a constitutive element of everyday life and popular culture, within particular social and historical settings. Football, as one of the most popular mass sports in the world, has a great social, cultural and political impact in (re-)producing collective identities on all levels. The ritualised sporting events became an expression of their imagined communities.

In June 2016, the Suning Holdings Group, one of China’s largest retail business enterprises with more than 1,600 stores, spend €270 million (US$ 307 million) to buy a majority stake of 68.55 percent in European football club Inter Milan. The Suning Holdings Group is based in Nanjing, where the next ICC game will take place on Monday: Inter Milan vs Olympique Lyonnais. For this reason it will probably be a “home game” for Inter.