China jails former football coach Li Tie for bribery

The former coach of China’s men’s soccer team has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for bribery, state media reported.

Li Tie, who also played for Everton in the English Premier League, confessed earlier this year to match-fixing, accepting bribes and offering bribes to get the top coaching job.

The case shows how President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption crackdown has affected sports, banking and the military.

Earlier this week, three former officials of the Chinese Football Association (CFA) were also sentenced to prison for bribery. More than a dozen coaches and players have been investigated.

Li, who was the head coach of the national team from January 2020 to December 2021, pleaded guilty in March to accepting more than $16 million in bribes.

The court said this happened from 2015, when he was an assistant coach at Hebei China Fortune Club, until 2021, when he resigned as national coach.

In exchange for the bribes, Li would select certain people for the national team and help soccer clubs win competitions.

The 47-year-old appeared in an anti-corruption documentary broadcast by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV earlier this year, in which he apologized for his crimes.

“I’m so sorry. I should have kept my head on the ground and followed the right path,” he said. “There were certain things that at that time were common practices in football.”

Li had made 92 appearances for China and participated in the 2002 World Cup, the country’s only finals appearance to date.

Your former boss, former CFA president Chen XuyuanHe was sentenced to life in prison earlier this year for accepting bribes worth $11 million.

Xi had in the past expressed his ambition to turn China into a major football power.

In 2011, he spoke of his “three wishes” for Chinese football: to qualify for the World Cup again, host the tournament and one day win the trophy.

But the recent arrests and convictions of leading football figures, some of whom were officials tasked with leading the football revolution, have dealt another setback to the country’s football ambitions.

This latest anti-corruption campaign echoes an earlier crackdown on Chinese football in 2010, when several officials, national team players and referees were jailed for corruption.

This was also led by Xi, who was then vice president of China.

Rowan Simons, author of the book Bamboo Goalposts, about his long-term efforts to develop grassroots football in China, told BBC China earlier this year: “In many ways, (the current campaign) looks exactly the same as it did 10 years ago. years. with a different set of characters.

“How is it different? There’s a lot more money involved.”

Additional reporting by Zhijie Shao in Hong Kong