By Mark Baber
August 18 – One of the great anomalies in world football – FIFA’s tolerance of state control of football in China – looks to be coming to an end as the Chinese state publicly loosens its grip on the sport in a new reform drive announced on Monday.
According to the Chinese government news agency Xinhua: “The soccer reform of China has entered a historical stage” as a new plan is unveiled which focuses “on the adjustment and reform of Chinese Football Association (CFA)” and “will remove the connections between CFA and the national sports department. It aims to give CFA the full independent rights including financial, personnel system and international communications.”
At a meeting attended by CFA and sports officials, Liu Peng, Minister of Sports of China said: “It is a very big and influential step in system and mechanism to revive the Chinese soccer. As we announce the plan today, it marks that the disconnection has started. Based on the plan, we believe it will give new vitality to the CFA.
Cai Zhenhua, president of CFA, described the plan as the “dragon head part” as it is the initial and key procedure in pushing through the earlier issued overall reform plan of Chinese soccer which was passed by China’s central reform group early this year and which aims to both popularise the sport and improve the level of the national teams.
The overall reform plan aims to return China’s women’s team to the world’s top class in the medium term and to propel the men’s team into one of the world’s leading powers in the long term, with bidding to host the World Cup also a long-term goal.
On a practical level, the CFA will no longer be staffed by government officials as part of the ministry-level General Administration of Sport, a new organisational structure will be put in place and a new leadership of the CFA elected at the end of the year. The officials currently staffing the CFA will be given the choice of moving to other government departments or working for the reformed body full time.
According to the plan, the CFA will stop receiving government funding, depending instead on “independent marketing initiatives”, whilst many decision-making powers will be handed to a domestic league council.
Despite being an extremely popular sport in China, football has been riddled by scandal and match-fixing in the country and the men’s team is only ranked 79th in the world. By breaking the former of structure of football governance, combined with the withdrawal of state funding, the challenge is on to turn China into the footballing super-power its people are hoping for.
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