Back in 2002, this question was on the nation's lips: Was Bora Milutinovic, the charismatic Yugoslav coach of the Chinese football side, having a sexual relationship with Lily Li, a young sports reporter? They both denied it, but the public didn't want to believe that, particularly as Lily kept coming up with 'Milu'-presented scoops as he prepared to bring the national team to its first World Cup, in Japan and South Korea. She revelled in his reflected glory, and published a best-selling book called Zero Distance, which detailed how intimate their apparently platonic relationship was. The intrigue captivated the masses, who were then high on soccer and national pride. Marching to Milu's beat, the sports newspaper Titan went to war. It poached Lily, then the hottest of commodities, from a competitor for an unprecedented package of reportedly 3 million yuan a year. China failed to win a game; Milu ran for the hills; and Lily stopped writing. But as the dust settled, Titan had emerged as the major sports title in a cluttered market. At its peak the paper, which publishes three times a week, claimed to be selling 4 million to 5 million copies an issue, led largely by the Milu-Lily teamwork. These days, with little to sing about from the terraces, they say it's down to a million or so an issue - still significantly higher than other sports titles, not to mention most general dailies. Li Sheng, one of the paper's top editors, believes it has a unique readership: more than 80 per cent of them are secondary school and university students. Also - unusually for China, where most newspapers are city- or province-based - it sells right across the country. The paper was formed in 1988 in Changsha , Hunan province , where it was part of the provincial newspaper group. Now it is partly owned by the South African media conglomerate MIH Group. The paper has 30 journalists in China and 10 posted abroad. Li believes it is the foreign-based reporters that give it the edge over other sports papers and standard titles - many of which are beefing up their sports coverage. China excels in sports such as table tennis, badminton and diving, but the country's sports fans are much more interested in reading about basketball and soccer, Li said. And what really grabs readers is the China angle abroad - so the paper has, for example, one reporter dedicated to following NBA basketball star Yao Ming around Houston; another watching soccer player Sun Jihai's every move at Manchester City; and another following Shao Jiayi's progress in midfield for the German football team 1860 Munich. The resources Titan has been able to sling at its international coverage has taken a toll on its competition, which is part of the reason why more than 10 sports titles have gone under in the past few years. Apart from the dominance of Titan, some papers have blamed their demise on the growing competition from the internet and daily papers. But just as Milu helped Titan's cause by bringing China to the World Cup, Li believes Arie Haan, the Dutch coach of the national side, also did it a favour - by failing to bring the Chinese to the cup in Germany this summer. 'If China had qualified for the 2006 World Cup those other big papers would have hung in for it,' he said. 'Circulation for everyone would have rocketed, as would advertising revenue. And then they would likely have decided to keep going until the Olympics, at least. The competition would have been much tougher.' So it's been a peculiar route to success for Titan: a sports paper that has been lent a helping hand by salacious gossip and China's poor sporting performance. Peter Goff is a Beijing-based journalist