SPORTS are big business in any country, but in China, soccer has taken a scorching lead - backed by commercial money.
In a country which has no indigenous team sport, soccer is spreading like wildfire. Every week, hundreds of thousands of people watch matches across China, millions more are glued to their television sets.
Baggio, Klinsmann, Weah: the names trip off the tongues of today's Chinese youngsters with the same enthusiasm with which their parents, during the Cultural Revolution, chanted the names of Mao's army of model heroes; Lei Feng, Wang Jie and Qiu Shaoyun.
Clubs and teams have sprung up everywhere in the past few years; there are now 38 football clubs in Beijing. Thirty newspapers and magazines published in China are exclusively devoted to soccer, including the fortnightly Football World , published by the Football Association, which claims a circulation of 300,000.
Top teams compete in A and B divisions (28 in all) with the top two from the B League rising every season to take the place of the relegated bottom two from the A League. The best players in the A League make 20,000 yuan to 30,000 yuan (about HK$18,620 to $27,930) per month - more than 35 times as much as a university professor.
Transfer prices are also rising. Earlier this year, Wang Tao transferred from the People's Liberation Army (PLA) team Ba-Yi to Beijing Guoan for a record 660,000 yuan. The name Ba-Yi (8-1) comes from the famous Nanchang insurrection on August 1, 1927, which marked the transformation of Communist troops into the Red Army, forerunners of the PLA.
