In 2011, prior to ascending to General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping reportedly declared on a state visit to South Korea that China would win the FIFA World Cup by 2050. It sounded like harmless wishful thinking: China's men's national team had underperformed for so long – qualifying for a single World Cup, at which they failed to score and limped home after three defeats – that it was inconceivable. Perhaps the famously football-loving Xi had been overwhelmed in the moment by meeting Manchester United legend Park Ji-sung. Perhaps he was tempted into hubris by South Korea's record of qualifying for seven (now ten) tournaments in a row. In any case, Chinese football had experienced so many droughts and false dawns, it was easy to dismiss.
By 2015, however, Xi had put his money where his mouth was, overseeing a transformative reform package highlighted by a 50-point development plan that promised to revolutionize grassroots, professional and national football, the football industry and its numerous adjacent sectors, and make China a “football superpower.” Nowhere in the plan or other policy documents did it mention winning the World Cup, but Xi was evidently serious about soccer and it made the observers who had sneered four years earlier sit up and take notice: The Chinese Super League was catapulted onto British tabloid sports pages, European clubs stepped up their appeals to Chinese fans, and analysts of geopolitics began fretting about Chinese investors buying up foreign football assets.
Encouraged by far-reaching reforms relevant to every discipline across the social sciences, academic colleagues have since produced what is now a voluminous literature. There is much to recommend this field-spanning body of work, although if one were to find fault, it tends to foreground the empirical and is consequently undertheorized. The management and football business scholar, Sten Söderman, is exempt from these criticisms. He took Xi seriously from the outset, and his book explicitly aims to identify the strategies China needs to adopt to have a chance of winning the World Cup by 2050. Few studies on Chinese football emphasize conceptualization as explicitly as his book, which borrows extensively from the fields of management and business. Even fewer can boast an attempt to model the workings of Chinese football writ large. It is ambitious and well-informed, although (spoiler alert) I will go out on a limb and say that it will take more than a “strategic management mix” for China's men's national team to conquer Brazil or France (or South Korea).
Söderman's approach is innovative, sophisticated and thought-provoking. Don't be put off by the unintuitive neologism in the title, or the fact that China's football development plans have hit a brick wall due to the confluence of overbearing officials, zero-COVID policies, corruption and corporate debt. The author's goodwill towards Chinese football development is palpable, and he offers a considered attempt to explain why China's performance in football is incommensurate with developments in other areas. There is much sophistication and definitely no sneering here.
It is not to every reader's taste, but the use of short paragraphs and subheadings allows the author to cover enormous terrain while keeping the narrative snappy. It is not a user-unfriendly book, but there is a lot of specialist language that scholars lacking a background in management may find a slog. Some jargon seems unnecessary – “footballization” refers simply to the series of policy documents and proclamations that set out the reform policies. Readers may breathe a sigh of relief to be spared “multivariable feedback loop equations,” but must nevertheless confront a dizzying array of mixes, matrices and acronymized models. The author's quest for succinctness is effective, but on occasion leads to insufficient detail, nuance or contextualization.
Ultimately, the analysis is perfectly reasonable, albeit not radically different from conclusions reached by more straightforward means. It doesn't require a SWOT analysis or strategic management model to recognize that Chinese football is a complex “organizational field,” or to conclude that if the central government, private investors, the Chinese Football Association, professional clubs and the Chinese Super League are all pulling in different directions the results will be suboptimal. The author's approach does, however, contribute some needed conceptual clarity to the mass of empirical observations accumulated over the past few years, such as modelling leadership and team quality and the intersection of off-field and on-field activity. I am undecided about whether China's choices are limited to the implied binary of “copying Europe” or “going it alone.”
As to what China can do to improve the organization and function of its football, there is much sensible advice. Channelling grassroots social capital into developing football culture, creating a clearer incentive structure, rationalizing and joining up the many institutions involved, avoiding over-prescriptive planning, following through on initiatives and so on are all inarguable action points. Recommendations couched in abstract and theoretical terms may, however, limit their impact and practical utility. That doesn't lessen the value of the book, but it would be a missed opportunity for knowledge exchange given the author's substantial contribution to European football as the author of The Club Management Guide and many other publications on the business and organization of football.
China will probably not win the World Cup anytime soon, but as a significant political, economic and social endeavour, the development of Chinese football rightly commands the attentions of serious (and sympathetic) scholars like Sten Söderman and I recommend his book to you.
