Bend it straight

• Source: Global Times
• [00:57 November 10 2009]
• Comments

By Barkley Su

So my home team Beijing Guoan won the Chinese Super League title last week, the first one for Beijing since the domestic football league started 16 years ago. The fans took to the streets and I guess confetti was in the air, so was the chant notoriously known for its bizarre connection to a large domestic animal's reproductive organ.

I am not trying to take anything away from Guoan, after all I sincerely supported the club and cared about the league 10 years ago. But seriously, does it really matter? I guess if Jon Stewart of The Daily Show were to comment on this, he would say winning the CSL is like winning the Republican Primary: it's not much because every single contestant sucks and it's all very corrupt!

China's football team is a major embarrassment for the Chinese. The national squad can never get into the World Cup Final except for the year 2002, when Japan and South Korea, two arch rivals of China in the Asia Conference of FIFA, didn't compete in the preliminaries because they automatically qualifi ed as co-hosts of that year's competition. The serendipity, however, didn't keep China going as far as the fans would've wanted. Once in the final, the team lost all three group games and came home with a blank score sheet. China again failed to qualify for the 2006 and 2010 World Cups, in Germany and South Africa respectively. And Chinese teams started to lose against countries like Thailand and Singapore. Not to be disrespectful, but Singapore?

The fans wouldn't really be as mad as they are if the chronically abysmal performance of China's football teams was just a result of athletic ineptitude. The constant kungfu shows, the rampant point-shavings and the corrupt CFA (China Football Association), all have contributed to the widespread rage of fans.

Prior to the very recent arrest of a senior CFA official, top government figures, including both Vice President Xi Jinping and State Councilor Liu Yandong, spoke openly in October about Chinese football and implied an overhaul was to come.

Busy as they are, I am sure there must be stately matters more important than rectifying the footy situation for them to tend to. Unless…the footy situation has become a menace to social harmony!

Being a veteran NBA fan, I know the NBA league had also gone through a scandalous period back in the 1970's and early 1980's. But somehow I don't recall reading about Nixon, Ford, Carter or Reagan deliver a speech on getting the NBA back on track. The NBA realized it had lost its appeal to the American audience so it fixed it.

Now there might just be a slight difference there between the NBA and the CFA, as the latter is a governmental bureaucracy. Oh well.

Look, we all know how important sports are to us Chinese. But, do we really have to waste taxpayers' money on these useless and corrupt of screw-ups instead of building schools and providing basic medical care to rural residents? Maybe keeping China's footy teams where they are serves us better: it helps check our unwarranted and inflated pride that misleads us to thinking we are now officially good at all sports and beyond.

And for those of you who worry about something else: what if China's football teams actually become good and we are no longer a laughing stock? Don't worry. Human civilization would have been annihilated by aliens long before that happens.