Stadiums are reopening but detentions of major football figures overshadow the sport, as scandal engulfs basketball
ergio Agüero may be one of the greatest strikers of his generation, but he won an even rarer accolade in 2015, when he became the first – and last – Premier League footballer to take a selfie with Xi Jinping, China’s football-loving leader.
Chen was a popular appointment for the head of the CFA in 2019. He had previously been the president of Shanghai International Port Group, which had bought one of the city’s clubs and renamed them Shanghai Port FC in 2015, propelling the team to victory in the Chinese Super League in 2018. Between 2011 and 2020, Chinese clubs spent $1.7bn on international transfers, according to figures from Fifa. The spending peaked in 2016 when the Chinese Super League spent $450m on incoming transfers. Authorities asked why clubs were spending all this money on foreigners “who were just going to ship the money off somewhere else”, says Mark Dreyer, a Beijing-based sports analyst, and they began blocking spending.
Now the CFA is turning to women’s football. Top clubs are required to run a women’s team if they want to participate in the Chinese Super League. There is some hope that the women’s game can be a clean slate. It already performs better internationally than the men’s team, having qualified for the World Cup this year, a feat that the men’s team hasn’t managed since 2002. According to Simons, the CFA seems to be “giving up on the men’s game, which has given nothing but grief”.
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