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Xie's tough battle: Commercializing the game
Less than two weeks after being appointed China's top football bureaucrat, Xie Yalong is already showing signs that the tasks facing the nations' most popular sport are too huge for one man to handle.
"I am not the kind of person that raises his arms and issues a call for action," Xie said after his first meeting with the Super League club owners last week.
"Right now I'm just concentrating on listening to the opinions of everyone..., football belongs to everyone, so this is the task of everyone. One person's capacity to do anything is limited."
Xie replaced the unpopular Yan Shiduo as head of the China Football Association (CFA) after the Super League fell into turmoil last season as club owners threatened a boycott over allegations of match-fixing, crooked referees and gambling.
They also bemoaned the league's lack of commercial direction.
Yan's term also saw the men's national team eliminated in the early rounds of World Cup 2006 qualifying, while the women's team -- a perennial world powerhouse -- failed miserably at the Athens Olympics.
Last year's turmoil in the league led to a drastic downturn in ticket receipts, while television revenues failed to meet targets and top sponsor Siemen's refused to renew its multi-million dollar deal this season.
In his first major decision, Xie allowed club owners to vote for a month-long postponement of the season as many have failed to find sponsors in the run-up of the scheduled March 5 opening matches.
"So far people have been satisfied with Xie, he has a different style of working than Yan Shiduo," he told AFP.
Still, club owners are complaining that the centralized sports bureaucracy, traditionally geared toward winning medals at international events like the Olympics, lacks the marketing know how to run a modern, successful league.
With the CFA coming under the jurisdiction of the General Administration of Sports, China's sports ministry, the lines between commercial operations and government mandates are too often blurred and overlapping, they say.
Xie's task is to push forward marketing reforms that began with the establishment of the A-League 10 years ago, but which failed dismally during the Super League's maiden season last year.
"The most important thing for the Super League are its intangible assets," said Wei Jizhong, a former member of China's Olympic Committee who now runs a sports marketing company.
"The Super League must not only turn the situation around and generate profits, but more importantly it has to renew its value and on this basis create new value."
For this, it has to turn around its image of being plagued by gambling, corruption and bad refereeing, Wei said.
As far as bad refereeing is concerned, Xie has admitted that the problem mainly lies in the bureaucracy, as referees are directly accountable to the referee bureau of the sports ministry and not to the CFA and even less so to the Super League. With gambling, some progress has been made after the outgoing Yan last year urged police to crackdown on online betting. The result so far has seen at least one group in eastern Nanjing arrested. According to the Beijing Morning Post, six members of the group were charged with organizing 109 million yuan (13 million dollars) worth of bets on Super League league matches between March and July 2004.
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