Following China’s national soccer team’s embarrassing 5-1 loss to Thailand last month, the Chinese soccer club laid down on July 11 new punishments for disobedient and under-performing players—including compulsory “patriotic education” for rule-breakers.
Under the new sanctions, players from Guangzhou Evergrande, another underperforming soccer team, will suffer “severe punishment” for playing “passively” during matches against other countries.
Under-performers pay a penalty of 200,000 yuan ($32,582) and will be dropped from the team while those who break team rules could be suspended or forced into a sealed room for a month of nationalistic indoctrination.
The club chairman, Xu Jiayin, has promised to “crackdown on laziness” to ensure that Guangzhou soccer players improve their game.
The results of the Chinese national soccer team’s match against Thailand was “beyond endurance,” Xu told state media. The players had “lacked fighting spirit” and had “humiliated all Chinese soccer players and Chinese people” with the defeat.
A Shanghai-based Chinese soccer blogger Cameron Wilson agreed that the Thailand game had a “frighteningly bad result by China’s very low standards,” but did not see the “old-school Communist” mandates as a viable solution, cited by Telegraph, a U.K. newspaper.
Patriotism is unlikely to be the reason for Chinese soccer players’ under-performance, according to Wilson. He said that it was more likely the Chinese public’s high expectations for the Guangzhou soccer team that placed high pressure on the players.
