Case Details
The Beautiful Game as National Project: Why China’s Football Revival Got Stuck
The case examines why repeated top-down efforts to revive Chinese football failed to deliver sustained sporting or institutional progress despite ambitious policy commitments, substantial investment and successive governance reforms. Following China’s elimination from qualification for the 2026 FIFA World Cup and an expanded crackdown on match-fixing, bribery and corruption, the case places students in the position of the Chinese Football Association’s (CFA) new leadership team as it plans the sport’s future in mid-2025. Students explore the widening gap between extensive reform measures—including specialist football schools, stadium construction, foreign coaches, naturalized players, financial controls and disciplinary campaigns—and the long-term goals of youth development, professional governance, international best practice and integrity.
The case highlights a recurring “stuck system” in which short-term performance pressures, administrative influence, uneven implementation, shifting institutional dependencies and corruption repeatedly undermine long-term capability building. The central dilemma is whether the CFA should launch another campaign of tighter controls and reduced spending or address the deeper systemic conditions that have caused successive reform cycles to reproduce similar contradictions and disappointing outcomes.
Learning Objective:
1. Distinguish superficial structural reforms from meaningful cultural and institutional change in complex organizational settings.
2. Diagnose systemic feedback loops through which short-term interventions unintentionally reinforce the problems they are intended to solve.
3. Design incentive structures and performance metrics that prioritize long-term capability development over immediate results and visible policy compliance.
4. Explain how “campaign-style” governance shapes organizational behaviour in highly centralized, state-backed environments where economic and social objectives are linked to national development goals.
5. Evaluate institutional misconduct as a systemic rather than solely individual ethical failure, including how dependency on property developers, political networks, and other external stakeholders can make rule-bending an embedded mechanism for organizational survival.