Chinese former football star Li Tie, who also served as coach of the country’s national men’s team, has been handed a sentence of 20 years on corruption charges.
Li, who also played as a midfielder for the English Premier League side Everton, is the latest to fall amid China’s far-reaching anti-corruption campaign in its sports sector, and especially on football.
He was convicted of taking bribes worth over 110 million yuan (US$15.1 million) between 2015 and 2021, according to state media CCTV on Friday.
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Prosecutors in China’s Hubei province said that Li accepted more than 50 million yuan (US$6.8 million) in bribes from 2019 to 2021 when he was coach of China’s national and selection team from 2019 to 2021.
The court heard that during this period Li offered favours, like picking certain players for the national team and signing deals with particular football clubs. He also offered bribes of about 3 million yuan (US$412,800) to get his coaching role with the national team in 2019.
The former head coach, who also represented China on the field at the 2002 World Cup, confessed to match-fixing and bribery in a documentary aired on state television in January.
The CCTV documentary focused on an investigation into football by the party’s corruption watchdog the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) that began in 2023 after the Chinese team failed to qualify for the Qatar World Cup.
The programme also featured Chen Xuyuan, a former chairman of the Chinese Football Association, who said corruption was rife in the sport.
“The corruption in Chinese football does not only exist in certain individual areas – it’s everywhere, in each and every aspect,” Chen said in the CCTV documentary.
Chen, who was charged with bribery in September 2023, said he had received a “congratulatory” 300,000 yuan (US$42,000) each from two club officials the night before he became CFA boss in 2019, which they said was “the old rules of the game”. “If I tried to clean up the environment, wouldn’t I get myself caught?”
The programme aired shortly after President Xi Jinping told the CCDI to “show no mercy” in the campaign against corruption, which is in its 11th year.
During his appearance in the documentary, Li – who was head coach of the national team from 2019 to 2021 – said that as a player, he hated match-fixing but as a coach he realised it could improve his chance of winning – and advance his career.
“Once you achieve success in the wrong way, you become more and more desperate for more success,” he said. “This way then becomes a habit, and later on you even develop some reliance on it.”
Li was sacked for the national team’s performance in the run-up to the Qatar World Cup and was the first from the sport to be placed under investigation by the anti-corruption watchdog, in November 2022. He was charged with several counts of bribery in August last year.
Li had a “miraculous” eight victories out of nine matches in his debut season as manager of Hebei China Fortune, winning the team promotion to the Chinese Super League in 2015. Wuhan Zall Football Club was similarly promoted when Li was its manager in 2018.
But CCDI official Luo Chuan, who was involved in the investigation, said in the documentary that these successes were the result of bribery and match-fixing.
More from South China Morning Post:
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