Source: Politics
FIFA is expecting record-breaking revenue from the 2026 World Cup. But it’s still leaving a lot of money on the table — or more specifically, Chinese yuan.
Despite the expanded field in this year’s tournament, China’s men’s national team still failed to qualify. FIFA is now talking about expanding again to 64 teams in 2030, with the implicit hope of pulling in the Chinese team and its massive market of soccer-obsessed fans. The running joke in Chinese online soccer forums is that the men’s national team may still not qualify, says Hong Kong University Professor Xu Gouqi, who wrote a 2008 book on the role of sports in China.
“Chinese are not allowed to discuss many things in social media,” Xu noted in an interview. “But you can criticize the Chinese men’s football team with no consequences. It’s still a safe place.”
In fairness, the men’s team has not given its fans much reason for optimism over, well, the last century. The squad was an Asian powerhouse back in the 1930s, but has only qualified for the World Cup once, in 2002, when it failed to score a goal in losing all three of its games.
It’s not for lack of trying. Xi Jinping rode to power in China fresh off helming the wildly successful 2008 Beijing Olympics, and he’s keenly aware of how sports are intertwined with China’s sense of identity on the world stage, says Xu. One of Xi’s early promises: rebuilding the men’s national team to put it on a path to winning the World Cup by 2050, which is aligned with the Chinese Communist Party’s long-term blueprint for turning the country into a fully-modernized global superpower.
So far, it hasn’t been going great.
In the Asian qualifying tournament for the 2026 World Cup, the Chinese men’s team got pummeled 7-0 in one game against regional power Japan, while losing to Indonesia and tying Singapore (neither of which qualified, either). There are currently no Chinese men’s players playing in the top tiers of any of Europe’s professional leagues, a key metric of elite talent.
Experts detail a number of reasons for the failures, including corruption and the CCP’s top-down approach to athletics. At a fundamental level, it comes down to the lack of grassroots participation, says Rowan Simons, a U.K.-born, Beijing-based author of a book on soccer in China and founder of ClubFootball Beijing. “China still needs to concentrate on building the football culture that is shared by all nations playing in the World Cup finals. This is built on large numbers actually participating in the game,” Simons said in an e-mail. As it stands, registered youth soccer participation in China is still just a fraction of countries with far smaller populations, like England.
Xu agreed that while there is “a world class football fan base” in China, “you don’t get kids kicking the ball around” for fun the way you would see in say, South America or Europe. Parents view it as a waste of time “because the chance isn’t that great to succeed,” he said. Going to the best university is viewed as a more assured path.
But unlike Simons, Xu is optimistic that the Chinese men’s team can not just qualify but win the World Cup in the coming decades, which he says would bring out a whole new level of soccer obsession in the country of 1.4 billion — a FIFA marketer’s dream.
The answer, he says, lies in an approach China recently used to achieve Olympic success. Call it the Eileen Gu model.
Gu, the daughter of a first-generation Chinese immigrant mother, was born and raised in Northern California but competes for China in freestyle skiing. Her gold and silver medals at the Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina earlier this year made her one of the most decorated freestyle skiers in Olympic history.
“We just simply bring the best and brightest from the kid level” to China from other countries, said Xu. That would represent “not just a major breakthrough in sports,” he argued, but “a major breakthrough in the idea of China.”
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