But it's not just men's football. China at men's team sports sucks generally. At least football is the most competitive sports in the world so there's an excuse. Meanwhile men Chinese basketball isn't even best in Asia either and has gotten worse over the years.
Football is competitive so ok the team can suck. But it shouldn't apply to all team sports. There is something seriously wrong with the approach which could highlight real underlying problem on attitude towards teamwork. Something we cannot ignore in today's world. It's something that needs to be addressed.
Cuba has a good baseball team and the USSR had a good ice hockey team. So even those authoritative commie countries don't need to live with such humiliation.
It’s ok to suck at a few areas without needing to get into a panic about whether the system or race is terminally flawed.
China isn’t strong in team sports because there isn’t the same kind of grassroots mass participation in those sports in China compared to the rest of the world, the west especially. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because while you are purely focused on the benefits of having strong national team sports teams, you are not considering the enormous costs of having that luxury. Not just monetary, but in wasted human capital and opportunity costs.
For team sports to be strong, you can’t just have one great team to focus all your resources into. You need a whole ecosystem of multiple compatible leagues of full time professional athletes, trainers, reserves and academies continuously feeding new raw talent into the system to mine for the handful of people who got what it takes and to provide them with an environment where they are surrounded by similarly talented individuals and competing against similarly talented and driven teams. The amount of monetary resources needed to is probably worth several points of national GDP and probably more than what China spends on defence.
The other potentially equally massive by more hidden cost is the waste in human capital. There are countless movies and shows about promising young athletes chewed up and spat out by the western team sports machine struggling to make it in life with no real trade or skills, rapidly diminishing savings for the few short years they spent playing at their peak, and probably carrying a lot of long term injuries to boot. Hollywood don’t tend to especially focus on this, but try to spin it in a positive light as an over the hill has been beating the odds to make a highly improbable and celebrated comeback. But for every such fairytale ending, there are countless people who didn’t beat the odds and are left broken and forgotten.
And then we come to the opportunity cost element. The core attributes that makes a successful team sports player are also important and useful skills needed in other fields on life. Every person with the raw talent and potential needed to be successful in team sports fed into the sports machinery for their one in thousands or worse odds at making it big is one less talent that could have made a bigger contribution to society and sciences/technology/industry development.
There is a reason the west cannot seem to innovate anymore. Nepotism is one major factor, but another is that they are misdirected too much of their human capital into frankly irrelevant fields like law, media, sports and entertainment instead of the ‘boring’ but far more useful fields of maths, sciences and technology etc.
The analogy I like to use is that the west is like your rich spoilt silver spoon baby who spends his life in bars and clubs and golf courses, blowing through his inheritance but managing a decent handicap and living a glitzy showy lifestyle. China is the hungry young up and comer war orphan who lost everything to raiders so had to work up from nothing and built his own house from the ground up with his own hands and sweat, who’s business is now thriving and who’s net worth is now greater than the nepo baby’s. The nepo baby doesn’t like this and wants to start a fight to put the new upstart back in its place and is trying to round up lackeys and neighbours too gang up on the newcomer with him so they can split his riches after they gut him. What do you think China’s priorities should be right now? Join a golf club himself to start working on his golf game or hit the gym and prepare for war?