In America, our Mark Cubans buy sports franchises for fun and ego and access to all sorts of things. In China, a wealthy video-game magnate like Zhu Jun buys a football team and expensive players and coaches for all those reasons, but for a sense of nationalism as well. The following are a couple of brief passages from an interview the owner of the Shanghai Shenhua did with Patti Waldmeir of the Financial Times, which reveals a larger picture of a China that hopes to import what it needs for now while nurturing generations who will be able to create these things for themselves in the future.
••••••••••
“‘Football is a game every man loves,’ he says. ‘Through playing football, we hope to become stronger. China is becoming richer nowadays but, from my point of view, China is rich rather than strong. The country is lacking resistance. But football is a game full of resistance.’
What kind of resistance, I wonder? ‘Conflict,’ he replies. ‘China is not strong because people never say ‘No’. Tradition makes them restrain themselves rather than being open. What I am doing is to prove we can actually do everything, no matter whether the general public understands us or not.'”
••••••••••
“If the hope is that world-class players such as [Didier] Drogba and [Nicolas] Anelka can help create a world-class football nation to rival China’s status in the global economy – or for that matter, in ping-pong – it will not be easy. A mere 2,000 years after a game suspiciously like football was invented in China, the world’s most populous country has yet to make its presence felt in the world’s most popular sport.
The Chinese love to watch football; when the country qualified for its first and only World Cup tournament to date, in 2002, a reported 170m new television sets were bought to follow the team’s progress. But Chinese state media has quoted football officials as saying that only 100,000 children, in this land of 1.3bn, are playing any form of organised football, partly the result of high levels of corruption in the past.
The country’s presumed next ruler, Xi Jinping, recently outlined his plan for the Chinese game: first qualify for another World Cup; then host a World Cup; then win one. Part of Zhu’s vision, it seems, is that ‘Chinese football needs idols. Good young players will only be attracted when we make achievements.’”