Where Is the Chinese Team?
What Chinese football reveals about 78 trillion yuan of local debt, and about the conditions for China’s long-term success.
Introduction: China, Conspicuous by Its Absence
On foreign social media, a few weeks before the kick-off of the 2026 World Cup, a little joke is doing the rounds. “Where is the Chinese team? Probably censored by the Americans.”
Actually, no. It simply did not qualify. Not this time, not last time, and probably not next time either. China was knocked out in the third round of AFC qualifying in June 2025, one stage before the final format. Defeats against Indonesia 0-1 (ending a 68-year unbeaten record), Australia 0-2 and Saudi Arabia 0-1. End of campaign: 6 points, last place in Group C.
The paradox is simple. 400 million Chinese will follow the 2026 World Cup on their screens. Chinese corporate sponsors will be there. None of them will see their national team. China’s FIFA ranking as of 11 June 2026: 91st in the world. In 2016, the year Xi Jinping personally launched his football development plan, China was 81st. Ten years, ten places lost.
This is precisely where the flaw in the Chinese model deserves scrutiny.
I. Ten Years After the Xi Plan, China Has Gone Backwards
The “Medium- and Long-Term Development Plan for Chinese Football 2016-2050”, published in April 2016 by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Chinese Football Association and the Ministry of Education, sets out Xi Jinping’s three personal football dreams: to see China qualify for a World Cup again, to host one, and to win one by 2050.
The plan is carefully calibrated. 2020 targets: 20,000 academies, 70,000 pitches, 30 million primary and secondary pupils playing regularly, 50,000 trained teachers. 2030 targets: one pitch per 10,000 inhabitants, Asian superpower status. 2050 targets: global superpower. It is the familiar formula of a Chinese long-term plan, the kind we are used to seeing delivered.
The ten-year scorecard is brutal.
At the 2024 Asian Cup, China posted its worst result ever: 18th place, not a single goal scored in the group stage, an unprecedented performance in 43 years of history. In January 2024, a 1-2 defeat against Hong Kong, a first in 39 years.
The regional comparison is immediate: Japan is 18th in the world, Iran 20th, South Korea 25th, Australia 27th. These four neighbours have long since surpassed the level China hoped to reach by 2030. China sits between Uzbekistan (50th) and Bahrain (92nd), the 13th-ranked team in the Asian Football Confederation.
On the plan’s measurable indicators (pitches built, academies opened, pupils enrolled), the official figures have been met. On the national team’s sporting performance, the gap with the objective widened even as resources increased.
Why does this system, which works elsewhere, fail here?
II. The Core Contradiction: Long-Term Vision, Short-Term Execution
The cause is neither a lack of resources nor corruption, spectacular as the latter may be (Chen Xuyuan, former president of the CFA (Chinese Football Association), sentenced to life imprisonment in March 2024 for 81 million yuan in bribes; Yu Hongchen, vice-president, thirteen years; around ten senior sports officials brought down since late 2022). Corruption is a symptom, not the disease.
The structural cause is a misalignment between two clocks. The national vision is calibrated over thirty-five years. Execution is entrusted to actors whose terms last three to five years. The result, mechanically, is the short-term execution of a long-term strategy.
The Fundamental Misalignment: A Long-Term Plan, Short-Term Leaders
Developing a professional player takes fifteen to twenty years, from primary school to international experience. The full cycle (school → academy → youth league → senior league → national team) cannot be compressed. A national technical plan sustained for fifteen years produces measurable results. Interrupted, it produces nothing.
The CFA president, provincial sports leaders and the heads of the federation’s academies serve terms of three to five years. They do not come from football. Chen Xuyuan, head of the federation from 2019 to 2023, had built his career at the Port of Shanghai. His predecessors came from table tennis, badminton or the administrative sports bureaucracy. They are Party cadres posted to sport, not football professionals promoted into administration. For them, the CFA is one step in a political career whose clock is set by the next posting, not by the generation of players to be trained.
The consequence is mechanical. Succeeding in a CFA posting, on the timeline of a political career, means producing a visible signal within thirty-six months: a qualification, a high-profile naturalisation, a famous foreign coach, a win in a high-visibility match. Investing in a generation of ten-year-old players, whose return will show up at the 2038 or 2042 World Cups, earns no one a promotion. The political term and the player’s incubation cycle are structurally at odds. China changed national coach five times between 2023 and 2025. No technical direction was maintained for more than two years.
On top of this unstable technical direction comes a second consequence: leaders’ lack of on-the-ground knowledge leads to poorly calibrated technical decisions. Foreign coaches selected for their reputation rather than their fit, methodologies transplanted without adaptation, tactical choices dictated by political pressure. A Party cadre who has never played football cannot judge whether a long-term plan is well calibrated, and in any case has no incentive to do so.
Contrast with Japan: Kohzo Tashima, president of the Japan Football Association, played at university level, coached Japan’s youth teams and worked for thirty years within the federation before taking the helm in 2016. For him, technical direction is not one administrative file among many. It is his specialty. The unified national technical plan, published in 1996, has been maintained ever since, regardless of administrative rotations. South Korea has operated on a comparable model since the 1990s.
The Aggravating Factor: With No Private Clubs, Training Falls to Schools, Which Suffer the Same Misalignment
This misalignment would already be damaging if it affected only the CFA. It is amplified by a structural factor specific to Chinese football: the near-total absence of an ecosystem of private clubs for children and teenagers.
In Japan, Korea, Brazil or Europe, youth football development relies on a dense network of private clubs independent of the school system. A seven-year-old joins a local club, trains once or twice a week independently of school, and plays in weekend competitions. The club operates on its own long cycle, not subordinated to the school’s. It produces players at fifteen or eighteen according to its own autonomous, long-term logic.
This network barely exists in China. Children’s training is run by the public school system. The Xi 2016-2050 plan explicitly reinforced this approach by multiplying football-specialist schools and integrating football into the school curriculum. Youth teams are therefore housed in schools, under the responsibility of the education authorities.
Yet Chinese schooling is itself structured around short cycles. Six years of primary school, three years of middle school, three years of high school. At each stage, the child is assessed on immediate academic results. At fifteen, they sit the 中考 (zhōng kǎo, the high school entrance exam), which determines their secondary school. At eighteen, the 高考 (gāo kǎo, the university entrance exam), which determines their life trajectory. Each cycle has its own pressure for results, its own demands for measurable performance, its own decisive exams.
The misalignment is therefore replicated at a second level. The teacher who hosts a school football team is assessed on pupils’ exam pass rates. The head teacher is assessed on the school’s ranking. Parents weigh a football investment with an uncertain return at fifteen against an academic investment whose return is measured every three years by a decisive exam. A school football team cannot demand the required training volume (one to three sessions a week, continuity over twelve months) without colliding with priority academic demands. The talented Chinese child is forced to choose. Most choose, rationally, an academic future.
The gap in preparation at eighteen compared with young Japanese, Korean or European players, trained in autonomous clubs running on a long cycle not subordinated to school exams, can never be closed.
The temporal misalignment is therefore not merely a feature of the CFA’s administrative terms. It runs through the entire incubation chain of the Chinese player. The national vision is calibrated over thirty-five years. No one in the execution chain has a clock that can align with it.
This finding goes beyond football. Wherever the central long-term vision is not supported by aligned short-term objectives among those executing it, the Chinese system shows cracks. Regardless of political ambition, regardless of resources, regardless of the personal authority brought to bear. Football is the visible example. It is far from the only one.
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III. The 78 Trillion Yuan That Follow the Same Mechanism
The mechanism identified in football is neither sporting nor anecdotal. It shapes one of China’s biggest macroeconomic issues: local government debt.
LGFV debt (Local Government Financing Vehicles) is estimated at between 58 and 78 trillion yuan depending on the source (IMF and BBVA Research). China’s total augmented public debt reached 117 to 124% of GDP in 2024, compared with 62% in 2019. In November 2024, Beijing announced a 10 trillion yuan restructuring as “solving the problem”. Fitch estimates that it covers only 25% of total hidden debt.
The operating mechanism is the same as in football. A Party secretary takes office in a province for five years. He is assessed on local GDP growth. He steers LGFVs that borrow against land as collateral to finance infrastructure whose GDP impact is immediate but whose real financial return materialises over twenty to thirty years. The bulk of repayment falls due after his term. His successor inherits the debt and repeats the mechanism to keep his own indicators up.
Yang Yao, an economist at Peking University, explicitly attributes the problem to
“the moral hazard of local governments that do not bear the risk of their own borrowing, and the frequent rotation of officials”.
The same misalignment appears elsewhere on a smaller scale.
Men’s basketball: Yao Ming personally ran the CBA from 2017 to 2024 to impose a long-term vision. Elimination from the 2024 Olympic Games. The personal authority of an iconic figure was not enough to neutralise the underlying administrative misalignment. Men’s tennis: a contrast with Chinese women’s tennis (Li Na, Zheng Qinwen), whose stars built their careers outside the federation’s administration. Men’s tennis, dependent on the federation, has not produced a single player in the world top 100.
Birth-rate policy: a central strategy requiring a demographic rebound over twenty to thirty years, executed by provincial administrations on short terms, with no continuity. Fertility rate of 1.09 in 2022; 6.1 million marriages in 2024 versus 13 million in 2013.
IV. What Makes the Chinese Model of Long-Term Execution Work Nonetheless
It would be wrong to conclude that the Chinese model of long-term execution fails systematically. The observable reality is that three conditions allow the model to work. When any one of the three is present, the flaw of temporal misalignment disappears.
Condition 1: Direct central steering
When central power (Xi himself, the Politburo, the Central Military Commission, the National Development and Reform Commission) steers a project directly, the technical direction remains stable regardless of local administrative rotations. Those in charge of execution report to the top, not to their provincial superiors. Evaluation criteria become explicitly long-term.
Illustrative cases: the crewed space programme (Shenzhou since 1999, Tiangong station operational in 2022), strategic nuclear submarines, hypersonic missiles (DF-17, YJ-21), the high-speed rail network (48,000 kilometres in 2024, more than the rest of the world combined), and the Belt and Road Initiative in its initial phase. In these cases, central vision and central execution coincide.
Condition 2: Arbitration by the private market
When a private market functions and arbitrates decisions independently of the administration, the short-term / long-cycle misalignment is absorbed by private players whose own profitability horizons are aligned with their investment cycles.
Illustrative cases: e-commerce (Alibaba, JD, Pinduoduo, Meituan), electric vehicles (BYD, Nio, Xpeng, Li Auto), content and gaming platforms (ByteDance, Tencent), fintech (Ant Group), batteries (CATL). The administration sets a regulatory framework but does not execute directly. Long-term investment cycles are carried by companies with their own strategic logic.
Condition 3: Strong, lasting alignment between the centre and local execution
When a central strategic priority is translated into local evaluation criteria that remain stable over several successive terms, local execution falls into line. Local officials understand that their promotion depends on long-term performance, not on a short-term result.
Illustrative cases: the rural poverty reduction policy of 2013-2020 (local cadres assessed on multi-year indicators with direct accountability to the Politburo, with an official result of 100 million people lifted above the rural poverty line), and the Three-North Shelterbelt reforestation programme (三北防护林) since 1978 (tree survival criteria held stable across several generations of cadres).
These three conditions define the domain in which the Chinese model of long-term execution succeeds. The flaw appears strictly when none of the three is present.
V. Operational Implications for Western Companies
The temporal misalignment between central vision and local execution shapes how Western companies must operate in China, at three levels.
1. Read the Five-Year Plan, but also read the political calendar of the local Party secretary.
Most Western companies carefully read the central documents (the Five-Year Plan, speeches from the 20th Party Congress, NDRC sector guidelines). This reading gives the direction of the vision, not the timetable for its execution. What determines execution is the political calendar of the Party secretary in the province or municipality where the assets are located.
A secretary at the start of their term seeks to establish a political signature and launches new projects. A secretary at the end of their term closes files, manages the transition and avoids risky decisions. Negotiating with a secretary fourteen months away from a likely promotion means committing to someone who will be gone before the agreement is executed.
2. Read national sector policies, but also their local translations, particularly in healthcare and tech.
A Chinese sector policy must be read at two levels. The national level sets the framework; the local level determines what will actually be executed. In healthcare, the “Healthy China 2030” plan is translated differently from one province to another: Zhejiang is fast-tracking approvals for foreign medical devices, Sichuan prioritises local production of generics, and Hainan runs a pilot zone for accelerated imports. In tech, Shanghai concentrates its subsidies on semiconductors and AI, Shenzhen on robotics, Hangzhou on cloud, Hefei on solar and EVs.
A company that reads only at the central level misses these differentials. It negotiates standardised terms while the neighbouring province offers far more favourable preferential terms in its specific segment.
3. Negotiate with local officials with an understanding of their room for manoeuvre relative to the centre.
A Chinese local official is not a mere executor of the centre. They have room for manoeuvre that varies with their political distance from the top, their term cycle and the political usefulness of the file for their personal trajectory. A Western negotiator who identifies these parameters can propose packages structured around the political profile of their counterpart (projects visible within their term cycle, contributions to their evaluation indicators). A negotiator who ignores them proposes standard packages, less attractive than a calibrated competing offer.
The same reading applies, symmetrically, when hosting Chinese investment in Europe. A European company receiving investment from a Chinese province must read the investor’s political profile: where the mandate comes from, who carries it, and how long it will hold.
These three levels of analysis are not the stuff of conventional desk research. They require a dedicated analytical capability: either an in-house government affairs team with local roots, a specialised Chinese consultancy, or a structural partnership with a player that has these capabilities.
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