Match fixing plagued Chinese soccer, reaching a catastrophic peak during the pandemic when matches were held in empty stadiums. Coaches and managers would clandestinely buy and sell games, while players, fully aware of the rigged outcomes, bet regularly against their own teams. The slimy underbelly of Chinese soccer came to light with Jiangsu Suning, a Chinese Super League team, battling Taizhou Yuanda in Nanjing in 2020.
According to one player, this period was the zenith of corruption. A former Chinese Super League player, speaking anonymously to The South China Morning Post, revealed the scale of the deceit. Recently, the China Football Association issued lifetime bans to 43 players and officials after a thorough investigation into widespread corruption and match-fixing.
The probe implicated about 120 matches, 128 criminal suspects, and 41 teams, authorities reported. High-profile casualties of this scandal included former Chinese internationals Jin Jingdao, Guo Tianyu, and Gu Chao, alongside South Korean international and World Cup star Son Jun-ho, who also faced a ban. Days after the bans, Son Jun-ho recounted in a South Korean press conference how he was detained by Chinese authorities for almost a year and “coerced” into admitting to bribery charges.
He claimed the police threatened his family, showing him pictures of his children and warning they would arrest his wife unless he confessed, which he insists he didn’t fully comprehend. Observers in the soccer world speculated whether some players were made scapegoats for the Chinese national team’s failures on the global stage. In 2015, President Xi Jinping voiced grand ambitions to rejuvenate the men’s national team and even aimed for a World Cup victory.
Despite vast financial investments in the sport, the team has deteriorated, climaxing in an embarrassing 7-0 defeat by Japan just a week prior to the CFA’s announcements. Authorities placed the blame squarely on soccer corruption for the national team’s shortcomings. The depth of this corruption was illuminated by the anonymous player, now in his mid-30s and active in an Asian league.
He recounted how match-fixing was rampant in the Chinese second tier, with coaches and managers collaborating to buy and sell games, influencing promotions and relegations. “It got so bad that I knew which games we were going to sell..
. I could tell from the training two days before if we were going to try and play,” the source disclosed. “If we were trying to win, in training, we’d do 11 v 11 games, we’d have set piece training, team meetings, video analysis.
But if we were going to lose, days before we’d be playing 15 versus 15 in training, on half-size pitches, and the coaches would join in, it was like being back in school.” “A lot of the players were seeing what I was seeing, and then they would just bet on us to lose,” he added. This stark account reformulates the perception of soccer in China, exposing the murky practices that tainted what is revered globally as the beautiful game.
.
