China is everywhere at the World Cup except on the field

The World Cup is becoming increasingly dependent on China, yet China’s national football team is no closer to featuring in it.

The global sporting spectacle that is the World Cup — the quadrennial tournament that kicks off this week — is not only a stage for athletic competition, but also a lens through which to observe how China is integrating into the global system.

China’s alternative presence

China made its first World Cup appearance in 2002, but has failed to qualify ever since. This year’s tournament, jointly hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico for the first time, has expanded from 32 to 48 teams, yet China remains on the outside looking in.

China’s men’s national team has long been absent from the World Cup, but China itself has not. Chinese elements are so extensive that local media routinely break it down into categories.

From a regional perspective, there is manufacturing from Zhejiang — especially Yiwu — as well as Guangdong and Shandong. By sector, there is Chinese manufacturing, Chinese technological innovation, Chinese sponsorship, Chinese infrastructure, Chinese referees and Chinese fans. China’s presence now extends across virtually every layer of the World Cup ecosystem beyond the pitch.

From souvenirs and fan merchandise to match balls fitted with smart chips, Chinese manufacturing is deeply embedded in the World Cup’s supply chains and has become an integral part of the global sports economy. This role is driven not by achievements on the pitch, but by China’s place in global industrial networks and its manufacturing prowess.

China is also represented in the refereeing ranks, with referee Ma Ning, video assistant referee (VAR) Fu Ming and assistant referee Zhou Fei selected for the tournament. At 43, Fu is the first Chinese to serve as a World Cup VAR. At 46, Ma has become a symbolic figure for many Chinese fans. Weibo chatter has attracted more than 3.6 million views, and he has even been woven into the marketing narratives of Chinese World Cup sponsors.

In terms of content broadcasting, a China-led media landscape has taken shape, dominated by CCTV, with participation from platforms such as Migu and RedNote. RedNote’s acquisition of broadcasting rights, despite its predominantly female user base, is seen as a bold commercial gamble to expand into male-dominated traffic.

Why no China on the pitch?

In this ever-expanding “map of China”, one crucial piece has always been missing — the Chinese national football team. A remark made by CCTV presenter Bai Yansong during the 2018 World Cup in Russia still holds true today: “Everything in China will attend the 2018 World Cup except the national team.”

This may be the most painful reality for Chinese football. Through commerce, manufacturing and content platforms, China has become an important “peripheral participant” in the World Cup, yet this role does not translate into a place on the pitch.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has long been a football enthusiast. In 2011, then Vice President Xi articulated for the first time his “three wishes” for Chinese football: to qualify for, host and win the World Cup.

The path to realising these ambitions remains unclear. A recent article in The Economist titled “Why China is so bad at football” noted that under FIFA’s current rotation system between continents, the earliest China could host a World Cup would be 2042. This means that even if one of the Chinese leader’s dreams comes true, it would be more than 30 years from 2011, by which time Xi would be 89 years old.

For years, Chinese media have blamed the stuttering state of Chinese football on corruption, incomplete marketisation, chaotic league governance and the collapse of youth development. The disorderly boom in “moneyball football” from around 2010 left problems stemming from deep structural distortions — school football schemes have been criticised as mere vanity projects that have failed to create inroads into the professional system.

But the deeper problem lies in the logic of governance itself. Mark Dreyer, the sports expert and longtime follower of Chinese football who wrote the Economist piece, argued that the real issue is that football in China sits firmly within the state bureaucracy, and has become a political project complete with targets, slogans and official directives.

Organic growth

He analysed that top-down planning has served China well in areas such as infrastructure and electric vehicles, but a successful football culture is usually messy, local and organic, relying on children playing informally and on spontaneous societal evolution.

He added that China excels in individual Olympic sports because success can be engineered through repetition and centralised training systems. Football, by contrast, depends on improvisation, unpredictability and a deep grassroots base.

However, a form of football that embodies grassroots energy is beginning to emerge at the local level in China.

Grassroots leagues such as Guizhou’s “village super leagues” and Jiangsu’s “Su Super League” look refreshing: being locally driven with low barriers to entry and light administrative control, and featuring high emotional value and wide reach — some matches even generate more buzz than professional fixtures.

These competitions do not rely on the national team system or elite academies, but run on grassroots, local and self-organised efforts. They are not professional, but feature an essential ingredient for football: spontaneous participation. The village super leagues in particular consist of footballers with day jobs — there are no highly-paid superstars, and what spectators see is “Wang from the next village up against Li from the neighbouring hamlet”.

Whether this rise of grassroots football can eventually be turned into systemic competitiveness and help China become a football powerhouse is something only time will tell. At the very least, it fits the basic logic that experts advocate: football needs to grow organically with participation, not planning, as the starting point.

Top‑down design can help build stadiums, but it does not necessarily nurture a football culture. China might be one of the countries most adept at grand design globally, but football is just the kind of thing that cannot be planned. Its greatest charm lies in its unpredictability, which is why great footballing nations more often emerge from the streets and communities rather than from documents and targets.

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “没有中国队的世界杯”.

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