Why China strikes Olympic gold but misses the World Cup

For the first time in history, the FIFA World Cup opening ceremony in Mexico last week featured a flag roll call introducing 48 competing nations, up from the traditional 32. But even with the expanded format, China was nowhere to be seen.

It surely was not for lack of trying.

For more than a decade, China has poured money, political attention and national prestige into the beautiful game. The country’s own leader, Xi Jinping, a huge football fan, even famously articulated three football dreams: for China to qualify for the World Cup, host it and eventually win it.

Stadiums were built, and academies sprang up across the country. Foreign stars and coaches were imported and, for a brief period, the Chinese Super League became Asia’s biggest spender, offering salaries generous enough to lure players away from some of Europe’s top leagues.

Yet today, China sits 91st in FIFA’s world rankings, behind countries with a fraction of its population, wealth and resources. Among Chinese fans, the men’s national team is a perennial disappointment and running joke.

Its men’s team has reached the World Cup only once – in 2002 – and went home without a point or a goal. The stars aligned that year: Co-hosts Japan and South Korea had automatically qualified, removing Asia’s two strongest sides from the qualifying field.

But football is hardly China’s only sporting blind spot.

The country has become one of the world’s most successful sporting nations. At the Paris Olympics in 2024, it tied the United States on gold medals with 40. It dominates sports ranging from diving and table tennis to weightlifting and badminton. In recent years, it has even become competitive in disciplines that were once entirely foreign to it, like curling and snowboarding.

Yet it remains largely absent from several of the world’s biggest team sports. Mainland China has never qualified for a Rugby World Cup, although Hong Kong secured a historic qualification for the 2027 tournament. Cricket remains a niche pursuit despite growing investment and its return to the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.

Why is it that China can excel spectacularly in some sports and fail so conspicuously in others?

The explanation has little to do with a shortage of talent and much to do with how different sports take root in a society.

Built for medals

China’s state-sponsored sports system was built to produce excellence. For decades, talented children have been identified when they are as young as four, channelled into specialised sports schools and subjected to highly structured training regimes. The system is exceptionally good at finding raw ability, concentrating resources and turning potential into medals.

Success depends largely on technical mastery, repetition, coaching and discipline – all areas in which China excels.

This helps explain why China could become a winter sports contender despite barely participating in the Winter Olympics before 1980. Once Beijing decided winter sports mattered, athletes were recruited from other sports, elite foreign coaches were brought in, teams were dispatched overseas for training, and hundreds of new ice and snow facilities were built.

Within a relatively short period, China had turned itself from a marginal participant into a credible winter sports power.

But football, rugby and cricket are different creatures; they cannot simply be drilled into existence.

Brazil did not become a football powerhouse because a ministry devised a strategic plan, nor did cricket take hold in India because officials decided it should.

They dominate public spaces and neighbourhoods, and children grow up playing them before they fully understand the rules. It’s a sporting culture that is messy, organic and largely impossible to manufacture from above.

Football, perhaps more than any other sport, rewards improvisation, creativity and intuition. Many of the qualities that separate good players from great ones are acquired long before formal coaching begins.

But exam pressure, urban density, risk-averse parenting and limited unstructured play all make it harder for children to develop the kind of instinctive feel that football or rugby requires.

Some observers have pointed to physiology. Yet if genetics were the determining factor, China would not be an Olympic superpower.

Chinese athletes have demonstrated speed, endurance, strength and tactical intelligence at the highest levels of international competition. Yao Ming became one of the US National Basketball Association’s most recognisable international stars, while Li Na won two Grand Slam titles and rose to world No. 2 in tennis.

There is another reason China’s model performs unevenly across sports. Its system was originally designed around Olympic medal production, which naturally favoured individual sports. A diver, gymnast or weightlifter can be identified young, trained intensively and assessed against clear benchmarks. Success depends largely on the performance of a single athlete.

But team sports are far more unruly and require not just individual excellence but chemistry, communication and split-second decision-making under pressure. A country can produce a world-class diver from a relatively small talent pool, but building a football nation requires an entire ecosystem beneath the elite level.

Building a football nation

In 2015, Beijing unveiled an ambitious blueprint to turn China into a football powerhouse. Schools were promised, pitches were built, local governments mobilised, and property developers poured money into professional clubs. The Chinese Super League went on a spending spree, attracting international stars such as Oscar and Hulk and fuelling hopes that China’s long-awaited football breakthrough was finally within reach.

But the boom was built on shaky foundations. Many clubs were bankrolled by property developers whose fortunes later collapsed with China’s housing market. The sport was then hit by corruption scandals, with senior football officials and national team figures swept up in anti-graft investigations.

Salary caps and restrictions on foreign signings made the league less attractive, clubs folded, and much of the momentum that had built up over the previous decade evaporated.

But Beijing has not given up on cracking the world’s biggest team sports. In rugby, it has increasingly tapped Hong Kong’s expertise, drawing on its more established coaching structures, competition pathways and international experience.

In cricket, Beijing wasted little time after its return to the Olympic programme, expanding funding and partnering with Australian institutions to accelerate player development. Universities have also begun recruiting and converting athletes into the sport. Whether that will be enough to secure Olympic qualification is another matter.

Yet China’s record in team sports is not entirely one of failure. Its women’s teams have often bucked the trend.

Chinese women’s volleyball has long been a national institution, while women’s football, field hockey, and basketball have all enjoyed periods of international success. The famous Steel Roses reached the Women’s World Cup final in 1999 and remain one of Asia’s most respected teams.

Part of the explanation is historical. When China began investing heavily in women’s sport during the 1980s and 1990s, many countries had not yet developed professional pathways or serious funding structures for female athletes.

China’s state-led system was able to generate a competitive advantage that was harder to achieve in men’s sports, where established football and basketball cultures had already been entrenched for decades or even centuries.

China’s rise over the past four decades has been defined by its ability to compress time. But football, rugby and cricket may be among the few pursuits that cannot be accelerated so easily.

For a country accustomed to achieving ambitious national goals, that may be the hardest sporting lesson of all.