The previous coach of the Chinese language nationwide males’s soccer crew has been sentenced to twenty years in jail for bribery, state media reported.
Li Tie, who additionally performed for Everton within the English Premier League, confessed earlier this yr to fixing matches, accepting bribes, and providing bribes to get the highest teaching job.
The case reveals how President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption crackdown has reduce via sport, banking and the navy.
Earlier this week, three former officers from the Chinese language Soccer Affiliation (CFA) had been additionally handed jail sentences for bribery. Greater than a dozen coaches and gamers have been investigated.
Li, who was the nationwide crew’s head coach from January 2020 to December 2021, pleaded responsible in March to taking on $16 million in bribes.
The courtroom mentioned that this occurred from 2015, when he was an assistant coach on the Hebei China Fortune Membership, till 2021, when he stop because the nationwide coach.
In change for the bribes, Li would choose sure people for the nationwide crew and assist soccer golf equipment win competitions.
The 47-year-old was featured in an anti-corruption documentary aired by Chinese language state broadcaster CCTV early this yr, whereby he apologised for his offences.
“I am very sorry. I ought to have saved my head to the bottom and adopted the precise path,” he mentioned. “There have been sure issues that on the time had been widespread practices in soccer.”
Li had made 92 appearances for China and performed on the 2002 World Cup – the nation’s solely look within the finals up to now.
His former boss, the former CFA president Chen Xuyuan, was sentenced to life in jail earlier this yr for accepting bribes value $11 million.
Xi had previously voiced his ambition to show China into a significant soccer energy.
In 2011, he spoke of his “three needs” for Chinese language soccer: to qualify for the World Cup once more, to host the event and to in the future win the trophy.
However the current detentions and convictions of main soccer figures – a few of whom had been officers tasked to guide the soccer revolution – have dealt one other setback to the nation’s soccer ambitions.
This newest anti-graft marketing campaign echoes an earlier crackdown in Chinese language soccer in 2010, when a number of officers, nationwide crew gamers and referees had been jailed for corruption.
That was additionally led by Xi, who was then China’s vice-president.
Rowan Simons, who authored the e book Bamboo Goalposts, on his long-term efforts to develop grassroots soccer in China, instructed BBC Chinese language earlier this yr: “In some ways, [the current campaign] seems precisely the identical because it was 10 years in the past with a unique set of characters.
“How is it totally different? There’s rather more cash concerned.”
Further reporting by Zhijie Shao in Hong Kong
