China's football crisis: what's happened to Xi's XI?

String of defeats and finishing bottom of World Cup qualifying group comes a decade after Xi Jinping launched a football crusade

China football
China lost 2-0 to Australia in Hangzhou this week, condemning the hosts to finishing bottom of their World Cup qualifying group
(Image credit: Hector Retamel / AFP via Getty Images)

China's miserable World Cup qualifying campaign has led to calls for the men’s football team to be disbanded and angry questions over why a country of 1.4 billion people could not find 11 players capable of winning a match.

Ten years after Xi Jinping launched a multibillion-dollar crusade to fulfil his three wishes – for China to qualify for the World Cup, host it and win it – those ambitions seem further away than ever.

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  Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.