After Beijing Winter Olympics, China eyes World Cup

This is the only way China could get their team in the World Cup.

China and Soccer, really?

What’s the going price for the World Cup these days ?

Enough of the sports for a while please.

How about giving back to me my freedoms?

Sick and tired seeing others freely travel in the name of sports on my tax money while I am being restricted!

I think that their first priority is to actually have a team that can play. Maybe buy Manchester City or Liverpool, give them citizenship (already a recent precedent for that). Mr Xi's dreams of seeing China winning a World Cup - dream on! The Great Wall becoming a skateboard park is more realistic.

coulda been

enjoyed reading your comment!

I think China should concentrate on more important things. They're doing fine as they are. In the meanwhile they should improve the standard of football and everyone else should enjoy the next World Cup in Qatar, the bastion of human rights.

Let's stop pretending good World citizenship has anything to do with who hosts Olympics and World Cups. Money, in the right pockets, talks.

Gotta agree with Pukey2 here, I think China has better things to be doing with their time. Then again, they have plenty of investments in helping other nations already, the Olympics certainly didn't stop that. I do have a feeling we would get more complaints and protests about China hosting it than Qatar though.

I would love to see China get better in football first maybe though. I suppose the logic here is that hosting the World Cup could inspire interest in football and help push the sport forward. That was the hope with the Winter Olympics too. Surely they can find the domestic talent if they truly wanted to, just don't know how much they actually do.

China has the ability to do any high-level sporting event, the Olympic Games prove it..

Go China!!..

Yeah, right. - Chinese people demonstrated their real interest on Feb 2, 2022:

“Give us a refund': China's latest World Cup flop sparks [fists of] fury”

“Angry Chinese football fans lashed out Wed at their country's "shameful" record after a 3-1 defeat at Vietnam ended any slim hope they had of reaching the 2022 World Cup.

The heavy loss on Tues caused outrage on Chinese social media as millions took to platforms such as the Twitter-like Weibo to air their grievances against the national team, who have long struggled to live up to expectations.

President Xi Jinping wants China to host and even win the World Cup one day, but the humiliating loss left China one place off the bottom of their qualifying group after eight games.” -

Seems millions of Chinese People have lost interest. What of the wishes of ‘The People’ ?

Go China!!..

@TokyoLiving 4:45pm: “China has the ability to do any high-level sporting event, the Olympic Games prove it.. 

Go China!!..”

China does not deserve any more world events. It will not get a world cup without bribing officials, for decades. Australia may be the next nation in the Asian soccer federation to host a world cup.

They are struggling for qualification for Qatar but have been at the past three in a row and progressed out of the group stage, losing to the eventual winners in the second round in Germany 2006.

China seems to have lost the ability to conduct diplomacy and have little respect in the international community at large and none at all in the West.

China's image has been on a downward spiral since Jinping took over.

If they do not change soon they will loose more than respect.

Peter14:

China does not deserve any more world events.

Cry ab it.

@ Tokyo Living

Not a snow flakes (artificial of course) chance in hell of them hosting the event. Over 1.5 billion people and they can't even raise a decent team to beat Vietnam. Maybe in the next millenium.

As Dusty Springfield once sang "Wishin' and Hoping.'

LOL Let the cloning and doping begin as the panda bear has dreams that will never become a reality.

Soccer fan President Xi Jinping has said he wants China to stage and even win the men's World Cup one day

They would be better suited to host the Squid Game Cup finals

Remember this, if China host the World Cup, the winner will be USA, for sure.

I don't think China will get to host the World Cup in 2034.

2026 is for the US/Canada/Mexico.

2030 is a UEFA hosted World Cup in Europe.

2034 is the next soonest World Cup open to AFC.

China has such an ill reputation in Europe that most UEFA members will oppose Chinese bid, especially after Uyghur genocide charges.

This leaves Australia, Japan, and Korea as potential hosts, barring another Middle Eastern bid(Saudi Arabia, UAE).

Then World Cup won't be open to AFC for another 16 years, in 2050.

I thought China invented soccer, no? I mean they did invent skiing.

Also remember, the internet is gimped in China. That would be the suckiest World Cup when fans of 31 other nations can't even access their regular internet and social media. Half the fun of going to these games is to share the experience with friends back home

It's one thing when the Olympics is all in one city where foreign fans can be given full access in certain locations. It's another thing when the World Cup requires foreign fans to travel from city to city to city - not only they can't access their usual internet while on the move, but they'll also be tracked wherever they go and do

That would suck big time

Furthermore, unlike the Olympics, many other nations can bid for the World Cup since all they need to build or renovate are soccer stadiums (and not other white elephants) - and many nations already have soccer stadiums

@Muratafan

Hard to say since they are both so old. Kind of a hazy picture of history in those eras.

Skiing yeah, most likely came from China as far as we can tell. Alternatively, possibly what is now Russia too.

Soccer is pretty hard to trace back since "kick the ball" sports developed independently worldwide. An argument could be made that Chinese Cuju was the earliest sport that resembles what we have now. I have seen arguments for Greece, Korea, and Japan being originators too, though China would probably predate them.

It is such a fundamentally simple sport at its core that it is probably functionally impossible to narrow down the invention to a single culture.