Beijing, October 16, 2016 Title: When Xie Yalong "Met" Axon: Ten Years of Anti-Gambling Storm in Chinese Football (One of the Series Planning for the 10th Anniversary of "Anti-Gambling Storm")
On the morning of the 16th, people who love football are paying attention to the world preliminary match between the national football team and the Philippines the night before, and the 0:0 result is a little helpless and a little regrettable. No. 11 player Axon missed a good chance to break the goal and left the game with his teammates after the game.
Aside from the unsatisfactory game, it seems to be a less than remarkable day; October 16, ten years ago, was also a seemingly unremarkable day - the football circle is still busy, except for some close relatives, few people notice Guangzhou Eagles Football Club general manager Zhong Guojian and Guangzhou Football Association official Yang Xu, who were taken away by the police for suspected gambling.
The coordinates point to Beijing, where Xie Yalong, who has "broken up" with football, drove the Audi A6 to a small five-story building on Chaoyangmenwai Street. In March of that year, he went from foot coordination to China Sports Industry Group as chairman. After arriving, Xie Yalong was very modest, and he repeatedly said that he was sent by the organization. The same thing was said more than once when he became president of the FOOTBALL Association in 2005.
After Xie Yalong, who was far away from the "forked psoas muscle" and the roar of "leaving class", the performance of the Chinese sports industry declined all the way, and at that time he should be struggling with how to do a good job. On that day, he probably would never have imagined that the arrest of 2 near strangers in Guangzhou would actually rewrite the fate of the second half of his life.
If you want to destroy it, you must first make it crazy
In 2009, the world is changing dramatically. In that era, there was no WeChat, and the happy network had just begun to rise, "non-mainstream" took pictures with scissor hands, and "kill Matt" had colorful hairstyles...
That year, the "Happy Girl" Zeng Yike was popular all over the country, holding a guitar and singing a famous song with a trembling "sheep tone": "The tail of July, you are Leo, the prelude to August, you are Leo." "Chinese football, which has sunk to the bottom, grabbed the tail of that year's Lion Moon and opened a anti-gambling anti-black storm that shocked the world.
The origin of the storm was that the public security department captured a former football player named Wang Xin, who confessed to the crime of manipulating the game and gambling on the ball after being arrested. The police follow the vine to touch the melon, the vine is smoother and longer, and the melon is getting bigger and bigger. On August 25, the public security organs set up a special team for the fight against organized crime in football, and by the end of 2009, the number of people involved in gambling and counterfeiting had reached 16.
Data chart: On June 13, 2012, Nan Yong, former director of the Foot Management Center of the State General Administration of Sport and vice chairman of the Chinese Football Association, walked out of the courtroom with a smile on his face, and he was sentenced to 10 years and 6 months in prison and fined 200,000 yuan by the Intermediate People's Court of Tieling City, Liaoning Province, on the same day. China News Service reporter Zhang Hao photographed
In March of that year, after Xie Yalong left the Football Association, Nan Yong became the head of the Chinese Football Association, and he took office to reopen the door of CCTV broadcasting for the Chinese Super League, openly competing for Gao Hongbo to enter the national football team, and also signed a long contract with Nike, bringing a large sponsorship fund to the Football Association.
At the award ceremony of the Chinese Super League at the end of 2009, Nan Yong thanked the Ministry of Public Security for its contribution to the anti-gambling crackdown and "paid high respect" to the public security personnel. A month later, Nan Yong fell, and his predecessor Xie Yalong and his colleague Yang Yimin, deputy director of the Foot Management Center of the General Administration of Sports, were also taken away by the police.
The anti-black storm lasted for a total of 1221 days, involving more than 30 players, referees, club staff, senior football association officials and so on. After "scraping bones to cure poison", how Chinese football gets out of the trough has become the focus of attention of all parties. When football was shrouded in a haze, Wei Di from the aquatic center was appointed as the head of the Football Association; a year later, Cai Zhenhua, a table tennis player, became the head of the General Bureau in charge of football.
Data chart: Cai Zhenhua was interviewed. Photo by reporter Lu Yan
The wine should be drunk one bite at a time, and the steps should be taken step by step
That year, the movie "Let the Bullets Fly" broke through the box office of 700 million and became a new benchmark for domestic films. Ma Bond, played by Ge You, said in the play: "The wine should be drunk one bite at a time, and the steps should be taken step by step, the steps are too big, and it is easy to pull the egg." Cai Zhenhua, who has been in the sports world for many years, is also well aware of this principle, and he has said more than once that the idea of quick success and quick profit is not good. In this way, Chinese football began to explore after the chaos was rectified.
The old saying has clouds, the road is long and its repair is far away, and the road of Chinese football seems to be "built particularly far", allowing Cai Zhenhua to "go up and down" and "left and right" various explorations, and his small ball has not been able to turn the big ball of football.
From the anticipation to the voice of doubt, Cai Zhenhua copied this parabola, and eventually even some fans jokingly called him "Cai Ping Pong". Before the national football team went to the Asian Cup in 2011, Cai Zhenhua even invited his proud disciple Liu Guoliang to give the team members a "lesson", hoping to share the secrets of the success of national table tennis to achieve the effect of inspiring the national football team. In the end, the national football team stopped in the group stage, and even with Wei Di libao, coach Gao Hongbo was still forced to leave the class.
Although the Asian Cup was broken, Gao Hongbo brought the national football team to the top five positions in Asia, while securing the seeding place in the World Preliminary Tournament. With the opening of the World Preliminary Tournament approaching, the position of the national football coach has been hanging in the air. If the local coach can't do it, he will change to a foreign coach, and in a hurry, the Spaniard Camacho has stepped onto the historical stage of Chinese football. At that time, Cai Zhenhua told CCTV that asking Camacho to coach the national football team is not for the sake of results: "We just invited the world's best coaching team to China, hoping that they would bring the most advanced concept of world football to China." ”
Time entered 2013, Wei Di was gone, Zhang Jian came. Before the belittled, bespectacled, thin legal expert, who was the director of the Foot Management Center, had time to light the "three fires," he was doused with a bucket of ice water.
What kind of advanced concept Camacho brought to Chinese football is still unknown, but under his command, the results of the national football team are getting worse and worse, first missing the Top 10 in the World Preliminary Round, and then losing 1:5 to Thailand in a friendly match.
A 1:5 shock to the whole country proved that Yang Shuai was not the "savior" of Chinese football, and the national football team was determined to resign Camacho, but "all the gifts of fate have long been secretly marked with prices", and the Football Association paid a sky-high liquidated damages of 50 million yuan for the dismissal of Camacho.
Cai Zhenhua did not expect that he found Camacho and let the Football Association "fold the wife and lose the soldiers". Painfully, Cai Zhenhua came to the front of the stage from behind the scenes, and he changed from the deputy director in charge of the football team of the General Administration of Sports to the new president of the Football Association.
Infographic: Camacho conducts the game.
Cai Zhenhua has been dealing with football for more than 6 years, during which time, the national football team has experienced a total of three foreign coaches, Camacho and Perrin have become passers-by in Chinese football, and the other is the current national football coach Lippi.
Before Lippi, after Perrin left class, the Football Association also temporarily found Gao Hongbo, who was abandoned at the beginning, to fight the fire, and Gao Hongbo, who ate the grass, successfully continued the life of the national football team and "historicly" entered the 12th round of the World Preliminary Round. But in the round of 12, he only achieved three losses and two draws, and after losing 0:2 to Uzbekistan, Gao Hongbo left a word, turned away -
"The leader thinks the responsibility is on me, the game is over, I choose to leave."
Although the achievements of the national team have been criticized in the past decade, Chinese football has indeed undergone many changes, the most important of which is the decoupling of the Football Association from the General Administration, and Chinese football after the separation of management and office has begun to operate more market-oriented, after which the unloved Chinese Super League copyright has been sold for 8 billion yuan, and Chinese football has been favored by more and more capital.
Data chart: On October 9, Guangzhou Tianhe Sports Center, The head coach of the Chinese men's national football team Lippi attended the pre-match press conference of the Chinese team against Guam in the 2022 Qatar World Cup qualifiers. China News Service reporter Chen Jimin photographed
Can the spark of a spark ignite the plains?
The more money, the higher the vision, not only the coach wants to be a world-class coach, but all the teams have also increased their reinforcements. Among them, Guangzhou Evergrande Football Club has the most generous shots, and the predecessor of this team is the Guangzhou Medical Team, which was relegated to the Middle League in the anti-gambling sweeping storm.
Now that I think about it, that storm actually changed the fate of many people, some people have since become prisoners, and some people have embarked on the fast track of their careers, and Xu Jiayin undoubtedly belongs to the latter. That year, his Evergrande Group was listed in Hong Kong, and he then spent 100 million yuan to buy out the Guangzhou Pharmaceutical Team and changed its name to Guangzhou Evergrande.
"Not bad money" has become the label of this team, they spend thousands of dollars, do not hesitate to buy a variety of big stars, the team's performance is naturally like sitting on the rocket, soaring.
Data chart: On October 5, at the Tianhe Sports Center in Guangzhou, Axon, a player of the Chinese men's national football team, participated in the training camp. China News Service reporter Chen Jimin photographed
2013 was an extremely important year for Guangzhou Evergrande and even Chinese football, when a Brazilian named Elkeson de Oliveira Cardoso made his debut in the Chinese Super League and won the AFC Champions League with the team, and Guangzhou Evergrande, led by Lippi, became the first Chinese team to win the championship after the AFC Champions League reform. Six years later, the Brazilian boy changed his name to Axon and became the first naturalized player in history without Chinese ancestry.
In Shanghai, more than 1,000 kilometers from Guangzhou, change is also quietly happening. SIPG sponsored the Promotion Horse shanghai East Asia in the Chinese Super League, the president of the group at that time was named Chen Shuyuan, and most of the players in the team came from the "Genbao Base" on Chongming Island.
At that time in Chinese football, Guangzhou Evergrande was a big family, and no one could have imagined that this new student in the Chinese Super League would one day break Evergrande's seven-year monopoly on the Chinese Super League championship, and their top scorer Wu Lei also landed in La Liga and became the "hope of the whole village".
After that, the fans are no longer unfamiliar with the story. After a long "window period" after Cai Zhenhua faded out of the sports world, Chen Shuyuan took over the mantle to become the new president of the Football Association, and Lippi and the national football team continued the frontier and led the team to launch an impact on the 2022 World Cup.
Data chart: Chen Shuyuan attended the press conference after the Football Congress. Courtesy of the Chinese Football Association
Looking back, a decade has passed since the darkest and most chaotic time in Chinese football, but everything seems like yesterday again. The "big three giants of the Football Association" who were arrested have been released from prison one after another, and Xie Yalong has restored his freedom at the beginning of this year, and someone has seen him on the subway not long ago. In the past ten years, whether it is a high-ranking official who has been imprisoned, or a "layman" who does not understand football, or a famous coach who "loves and kills" with the national football team, whether it is a merit or a pass, they are all writers of the history of Chinese football.
The wheel of time is still tirelessly driving forward, the national football team has once again embarked on the journey of the World Preliminary Round, naturalized players have joined the team, the Football Association is still actively bidding for the Club World Cup, and the league professional league is about to come out... Everything seems to be moving in a good direction. I don't know if Xie Yalong will turn on the TV today and watch a national football match; I don't know if there will be a moment when he and Axon will look at each other through the screen, and whether there will be an illusion of magic realism at that moment.
Grabbing the "Dragon King" and "South Head" may be completed in an instant; the muddy water of the fake gambling black may also make Chinese football look (at least look) a new look in a few years. However, the objective law determines that the development of a country's football must go through a long time. Some people say that today's Chinese football is like a snail, crawling forward slowly and firmly. However, how many decades can a person's life be? How many decades can the fans accompany the national football team along the way?
With the flames of the Qatar World Cup qualifiers, Chinese football has once again stood at a new starting point, hoping that this time the fans of the national football team will no longer suffer and no longer suffer.
The story of Chinese football is not to be continued. (Author Xing Rui)