On March 26, 2024, an intermediate-level court in Hubei province’s Huangshi city in China delivered an important judgement on Chen Xuyuan, the former president of the Chinese Football Association, sentencing him to life imprisonment for accepting bribes that amounted to 81 million yuan and charging him for “seriously undermining the fair competition and industrial ecology of the football area.” The court added that, due to Chen’s willingness to reveal the facts about his bribery activities, to unveil the illegal acts of others, and to return the illegal proceeds, the court’s verdict was already “lenient.”
Chen admitted his guilt in the court and bowed ninety degrees to the public for ten seconds, saying that he hoped football fans could forgive him. However, a lot of netizens in China did not really forgive him, adding in their comments on the social media that Chen should have been given “death penalty” – a reflection of the profound anger of many netizens.
Chen was born in Shanghai in 1956 and worked as a dock worker in Shanghai’s port authority in 1973. In 2005, he was promoted as a chief executive officer of the Shanggang Conglomerate in 2005, succeeding in buying into the ownership of the Shanghai Dongya (East Asia) Football Club in 2013. Within six years, he succeeded in turning the club into a forceful team that could be elevated to become the Chinese Super League’s champion. In 2019, Chen was appointed as a convenor of the preparatory committee of the Chinese Football Association (CFA). Later, he was elected as the president of the CFA, becoming the first professional Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in the CFA with a non-sports background. Chen’s position could be regarded as the first professional CEO in the history of Chinese football.
Chen advocated the idea of fighting against the “golden dollar football,” meaning that he was keen to combat the injection of tens of billions of dollars into the modernization of Chinese football. At the same time, he supported the idea of helping foreign players to be naturalized as Chinese players with Chinese citizenship – a controversial move at that time. Most importantly, Chen decided to recruit Li Tie, a former mid-fielder of Everton, to be the Chinese national football coach.
Li Tie was the Chinese national football coach from January 2020 to December 2021, but he was accused of giving and taking extensive bribes even long before he became the national coach. Li acknowledged in the court that he had arranged bribes to be paid for the sake of securing the head coach position. Moreover, Li admitted that he had participated in various match-fixing activities, and that he accepted more than 77 million yuan in bribes from 2017 to 2021 when he was working as a coach for the Wuhan Zall club.
The Chinese state broadcaster CCTV in January 2024 had interviewed Li Tie, who said he had paid 421,000 yuan in bribes to become a national coach. Li said in the TV program: “I’m very sorry, I should have kept my head to the ground and followed the right path. There were certain things that at the time were common practices in football.”
The Central Discipline Inspection Committee (CDIC) in November 2022 began an extensive investigation into football corruption, leading to the downfall of not only Chen Xuyuan but also five other top officials directly involved in the football field. These five executives included Yu Hongchen, the former chairman of the China Athletic Association, who was sentenced to 13 years for accepting 22 million from 13 football clubs in 13 years; Chen Yongliang, a deputy secretary of the CFA and minister of national team management, who was sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment for accepting 19 million yuan bribes from 20 clubs in 7 years; Dong Zheng, former general manager of the Chinese Super League, who was sentenced to 8 years of imprisonment for accepting 22 million yuan bribes from 23 clubs in 7 years; Liu Lei, a former director of the Wuhan Sports Center, who was sentenced to two and a half years of imprisonment for accepting 520,000 yuan bribes; and Wang Dengfeng, former vice president of the CFA, who was sentenced to 17 years for accepting 9.6 million bribes and illegally occupying public properties amounting to 46 million yuan in 6 years.
When Yu Hongchen heard that he was sentenced to 13 years in the court, he broke down in tears. His case was serious because one incident involved Yu’s manipulation in helping a Tianjin conglomerate to change its name in registration and to retain its position in the Super League. Even worse, Yu accepted bribes to help ten clubs arrange specific referees whose decisions were then biased in favor of these clubs. Clearly, Yu was deeply enmeshed in taking bribes and arranging “black” referees to make decisions in favor of those clubs which bribed him – a key middleman in the process of football corruption and match-fixing.
The case of Chen Yongliang was also a serious one because, according to the court description, he acted as “elderly” official, who helped alleviate the penalties imposed onto clubs and footballers, and who arranged some players to be selected as national team players. The court pointed to him as a person paying bribes of 900,000 yuan to Yu Hongchen for the sake of arranging his clients to be appointed to various influential committee positions of the CFA. Clearly, the usage of bribery to favor clients became a means by which Chen inserted them into the CFA’s influential committee memberships.
Dong Zheng was found to accept bribes in favor of the clubs’ match-scheduling, ticket arrangements, stadium inspection, the alleviation of penalties against logistical supplies, and the management of agents who represented players. His corruption pointed to extensive bribery pervading the entire football management practices. In 2018, Dong was accused of accepting a bank card with 1-million-yuan deposit, but he told the briber that such payment was “inconvenient.” As a result, the briber gave him cash of 1 million yuan. To avoid being detected, Dong let someone manage the one million yuan.
Liu Lei was found guilty of accepting bribes in exchange of his decisions on the football stadium’s repair and renewal work. It was alleged that from 2018 to 2022, Liu leaked out information on the tendering of construction and renewal projects so that six enterprises were apparently favored in the process of acquiring the tenders.
All these cases of football corruption illustrate some important characteristics.
First, the Chinese football corruption from 2019 to the end of 2022 was perhaps only a tip of the iceberg in the sense that syndicate corruption became emergent and was quickly entrenched in the football arena. If former president Chen and former vice president Wang were involved, as with other higher-tanking football executives, the entire CFA requires not only a much closer scrutiny from the CDIC, but its executive leaders also require anti-corruption education constantly and regularly to prevent corruption from reemerging in Chinese football.
Second, the choice of Chen Xuyuan was a wrong and a disastrous one because he rose up as a businessman with a rapid record of success in the football field. Indeed, in an era of rapid development, the Chinese sports officials and ministers at the top might want to achieve quick results in football development, especially since the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, was a football fan. Nevertheless, the desire to modernize Chinese football quickly was one thing, the selection of a proper person to lead the CFA was another. The choice of businessman Chen Xuyuan was arguably a poor judgement because football modernization and development were not just attributable to large capital investment; rather, ethical considerations were and are of paramount importance. Chen’s selection of Li Tie as the national head coach was another testimony showing the absence of ethics in the Chinese football development from 2020 to 2021.
Third, other cases of corruption, ranging from Chen Yongliang to Dong Zheng, from Yu Hongchen to Liu Lei, demonstrated the need for an extensive clean-up action in the CFA. The choice of “black” referees, the neglect of ethical and proper management practices, and the arbitrary action of utilizing personal rule rather than following any “rule of law” in the Chinese football circle were a testimony to the disgraceful actions that must be stopped, punished and deterred. With the arrest and imprisonment of the “gang” of seven – Chen Yongyuan, Li Tie, Yu Hongchen, Chen Yongliang, Dong Zhen, Liu Lei and Wang Dengfeng – football corruption has been terminated temporarily and its offenders have been punished. In fact, in April 2023, the deputy director of the General Administration of Sport of China (GAS), Du Zhaocai, was dismissed from his vice-ministerial position for alleged corruption. Disturbingly, Du was also the party secretary of the CFA. Clearly, syndicate corruption grew within the CFA for some years. The challenges are to instill the sense of ethics into the psyche of all CFA executives and to deter them, including officials, referees and managers, from stepping onto the corruption pathway again.
Fourth, whistleblowers must be encouraged in the process of fighting football corruption in China. On March 28, the reformed CFA vows to reward 2,000 yuan to 20,000 yuan to those whistleblowers who reveal football corruption activities, including match-fixing, football gambling and black refereeing. This incentive is not restricted to professional football but also amateur one, including the Chinese Super League, the Chinese Championship League and the youth league. Moreover, citizens who are at or over 65 years old are welcome to apply to CFA as representatives of supervision, working together with the Discipline Inspection Committee members at the municipal level for two years for the sake of enforcing the implementation of ethics in Chinese football management and operation. These volunteers who act as supervisors will also educate all those who work in the professional and amateur football arena on the importance of oversight and clean governance, collecting public opinion on football development and gathering public views for the government authorities. It remains to be seen such oversight and supervision will really work in the ongoing combat against football corruption.
Fifth, the conflicts of interest guidelines must be worked out by the CFA together with the inputs and advice from the Central Discipline Inspection Committee. Judging from the activities of the football corruption syndicate in the CFA, all the executives of football clubs need to avoid their conflicts of interests and roles if they are selected or appointed or elected to the committees under CFA. Declaration of conflicts of interests and the avoidance of attending committee meetings that involved the discussions of their own clubs will be necessary for the modernization of football development and the combat against football corruption. Without a strong sense of potential conflicts of interests and roles, and without extensive guidelines to prevent conflicts of interests, the leaders and representatives of football clubs would not be able to make impartial decisions defending the general interest of Chinese football development.
In conclusion, with the downfall of the football corruption syndicate led by Chen Xuyuan, the prospects of Chinese football modernization and development remain cautiously optimistic; nevertheless, such optimism is based on the assumptions that the Central Discipline Inspection Committee must regularly scrutinize the CFA work and operation through its dispatch of inspection teams, that the CFA leaders must act like ethical entrepreneurs rather than unethical businesspeople, that football corruption actors must be disclosed and punished severely, that whistleblowers must be encouraged and incentivized, and that the conflicts of interests guidelines must be adopted and implemented to inculcate a much stronger sense of ethics into the psyche of not only CFA leaders, but also coaches, players, referees and managers at all levels. Otherwise, the combat against football corruption and the drive to modernize Chinese football will likely remain a long and difficult path in the years to come.
*Sonny Shiu-Hing Lo is a political scientist, veteran commentator, and author of dozens of books and academic articles on Hong Kong, Macau, and Greater China
