The 14,000 fans who filled Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground for Everton’s League Cup visit on October 1, 2002, were witness to something special.
A 16-year-old Wayne Rooney, who would become Manchester United and England’s record goalscorer, hit his first-ever senior goals. He scored twice as a substitute as the visiting side won 3-0.
But the game was notable for another reason. It marked perhaps the high-water mark of Chinese football in England, with two players from the country — Li Tie and Li Weifeng —in Everton’s starting line-up.
That season, the club was also sponsored by Kejian, a now-defunct Chinese telecommunications company. Kejian played a role in signing the two players.
Although Li Weifeng would only make one other substitute appearance for Everton, Li Tie played 29 of 38 games for the club in the 2002-03 Premier League season as they finished seventh under David Moyes.
“He was tidy on the ball, skilful, he fitted right in,” says David Unsworth, who regularly played alongside Li Tie in the Everton side. “He didn’t try and segregate himself as a foreign player, he enjoyed the banter and had a laugh. He was an absolute diamond of a bloke.”
Unfortunately, that season was Li Tie’s peak in England. He was plagued by injuries and spent two seasons without playing a single game. Li returned to China in 2008 after an unsuccessful stint at Sheffield United.
But now Li, who served as manager of the Chinese national team from 2019 to 2021, has a serious problem on his hands. He is under investigation for “serious violation of laws” relating to corruption and last month made a televised confession as part of a match-fixing probe. People who have been convicted of corruption in China have been handed down long prison sentences.
The Athletic spoke to several Chinese football experts, with one speaking under the condition of anonymity due to the risks of criticising the government in China, to establish what Li’s confession says about the state of Chinese football.
“I’m totally shocked,” says Unsworth. “He’d be one of the last people I’d think would be corrupt.”
After retiring as a player in 2011, Li spent some time as an assistant manager before taking the top job at Hebei China Fortune in 2015 and leading them to promotion to the Chinese Super League. He later achieved the same with Wuhan Zall.
In 2019, he replaced Marcello Lippi, who coached Italy to World Cup glory in 2006, as caretaker manager of the Chinese national team before taking over the reins permanently.
But he was sacked two years later after failing to qualify for the World Cup in Qatar, which should hardly have been a surprise — China were 63rd in FIFA’s world rankings in 2022. They have never been as high since.
A year after Li’s departure, the Chinese public prosecutor put out a bombshell statement.
“Li Tie, the former head coach of the Chinese national men’s football team, was suspected of accepting bribes, offering bribes, offering bribes at the unit, accepting bribes of non-state employees, and offering bribes to non-state employees.”
Li admitted he paid 3million yuan (£331,000, $418,500) in bribes to become the national team coach and said he achieved his two promotions through match-fixing.
Chinese football is carrying out a massive clampdown on corruption, with several senior officials also swept up in it.
Li Tie, Chen Xuyuan, then head of the Chinese Football Association, and others have been accused of taking bribes, with Li and Chen confessing in the documentary.
“I am very sorry. I should have kept my head down and followed the right path,” the 46-year-old said. “There were certain things that were customary in football at the time,” he added.
Several other Chinese officials also confessed.
But what was really going on?
Nobody seriously doubts that corruption in Chinese football is a major problem. There were various match-fixing and bribery scandals in the 1990s and 2000s — like the rest of Asia, which is by far the world’s biggest gambling market.
But it is often difficult to distinguish between genuine corruption and the Chinese practice of guanxi, or gift-giving, which is a cultural feature of Chinese society and business, says Simon Chadwick.
Chadwick is a professor of sport and geopolitical economy at SKEMA Business School, has worked extensively in China, and briefly taught former Everton player Li Weifeng, who he describes as very reluctant to discuss political issues, like all of his Chinese students.
Chadwick says China’s anti-corruption drive has often been weaponised as a tool in the factional and conspiratorial world of politics, making it very hard to know the truth of what is going on in cases like Li’s.
“When Xi came to power, one of his platforms was the eradication of corruption in China. Because corruption is so important for the Chinese government, people buy into it, it’s an easy accusation to make and because of the absence of good governance, it’s an easy charge to enforce,” he says. “In Chinese culture, most people are never going to question it because, if you question the corruption purge, essentially you’re questioning the Chinese state.”
“No matter which way you slice this, the story is much less about Li and much more about the governance of Chinese sport.”
It is possible that Li could have fallen out with the wrong people, or simply been a scapegoat for the poor performance of the national team, he says. There is no evidence to back this up, but also, beyond the televised confession, there is no public evidence for Li’s alleged corruption.
Cameron Wilson is a Scottish football journalist who has lived in China for many years and publishes the Wild East Football blog. He says it is difficult to take allegations of corruption in modern China at face value.
“I didn’t really know what rule of law meant until I got to China,“ he says. ”Rule of law means there are laws which are written down and everybody has to follow them, including the government.
“But in China, the government just makes the rules and they interpret them as they please.”
He says that although Westerners may have justifiable reasons for not trusting their own institutions and the media, it is still more reliable than the Chinese system.
“You can walk into a court and you can watch, everything is transparent, you walk out of that court and you’re pretty confident that, ‘Actually, this is what happened’,” he says.
“In China, you can’t do that, it’s not transparent, there’s no due process. No one has any real faith in the actual truth, the veracity, of the legal system.”
Wilson notes that Chinese football is hardly a good opportunity to make money in corrupt ways given the huge numbers of convictions before Li. He speculates that Li may have fallen out with people or fallen on the wrong side of the grey line between corruption and patronage.
Without due process and the rule of law, it is simply impossible to say for certain.
The Athletic contacted many people who have worked in Chinese football, past and present, living inside and outside the country, to better understand the allegations surrounding Li.
This proved difficult, but one did agree to speak under the condition of anonymity: “If I talk too much, I might endanger people’s lives.”
In the often insular world of Chinese football, Li brought Premier League know-how, good English skills and the experience of playing in a World Cup, the person says. Li also spent some time in Brazil, which broadened his personal and footballing horizons.
President Xi has made football a key part of his platform and has spoken ambitiously of wanting his country to win or host a World Cup one day, but progress is going into reverse, money is flowing out of the game, and the national team is getting worse.
The person, who has met Li, though not for many years, speculates that Li could be being made a scapegoat for the failures of the Chinese football project — thereby avoiding criticism landing at the door of President Xi.
“In a totalitarian state, there is one boss, whatever decision he wants to make, he makes… I feel very sorry and sad for what has happened to Li Tie because he’s probably the best coach China could produce”.
“When you see people on TV doing confessions, be suspicious,” said the person, arguing that while the Chinese public might believe Li’s confession, people in the football industry are far more sceptical in private.
Many Chinese football watchers point to a 2003 match between Li Tie’s Everton and Manchester City, who at the time had Sun Jihai, the only other Chinese player to become a first-team regular in the Premier League.
A few others played a small number of games — Dong Fangzhuo has the dubious honour of receiving a guard of honour in the only game he ever played for Manchester United, a goalless draw against Chelsea in which United, already crowned as champions, fielded a heavily-rotated team ahead of the FA Cup final against the same opponents.
Media reports at the time claimed the 2003 game between City and Everton, which took place a year after China played at the World Cup for the first time, was the most-watched Premier League game ever. It has been said that hundreds of millions watched the game in China, although proving these numbers is tricky.
However, more than two decades later, there have been no more Chinese players of significance in England’s top flight and China has not qualified for another World Cup.
Chinese football languished in obscurity for decades after competitive sports were effectively banned under Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. They started up again in the late 1970s, but China was a footballing backwater for decades. Domestic leagues were rife with corruption and poor facilities.
This improved in the 2000s, the decade that saw China become more deeply embedded in the world as the economy boomed, joining the World Trade Organisation and hosting the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
From the mid-2010s onwards, Chinese football boomed as Xi Jinping personally encouraged wealthy Chinese people to invest in the sport, famously meeting Prime Minister David Cameron and Manchester City star Sergio Aguero in England in 2015.
Shortly after, big European stars like Didier Drogba and Carlos Tevez went to play in the Chinese Super League, which for a while was the biggest-spending league in the world.
But Chinese football is once again in retreat, with Xi losing interest and football no longer being seen as a source of national pride.
The issues facing Chinese football run far deeper than any one coach — Li Tie’s predecessor was Lippi, who has a World Cup, a Champions League trophy and five Serie A titles to his name as a manager.
Football has been caught up in the Chinese property slump and investors in European clubs have been trying to get rid of their assets, which they in many cases overpaid for. The struggles of the national team are a symptom and a cause of China’s retreat.
Xi wanted to invest to build an organic football ecosystem that could sustain itself, but that proved tricky — the new academies set up in China in the mid-2010s, heavily staffed by Europeans, have produced very little in the way of talent.
The person familiar with the inner workings of Chinese football says Xi is used to projecting Chinese power around the world and the failure of his football project is embarrassing in this respect.
“Somebody’s going to be to blame for this and it’s certainly not going to be President Xi and his allies.”
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