Only days after agreeing to help bail out the ailing Chinese Super League, the new British sponsor has had to apologise to the people of China for referring to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as separate countries on its website.
The new sponsor, iPhox, also scored an own-goal when it listed the language of Taiwan as Taiwanese and failed to list Chinese as a language anywhere on its site, other points that angered the Chinese Football Association and led to an outpouring of rage in mainland internet chatrooms.
The internet telephone company temporarily closed down sections of its Chinese-language site to make changes, and carried an apology on its homepage.
'IPhox Ltd would like to apologise to the CFA and the people of China for the problems we have been experiencing with listing countries, regions, and languages correctly. We are using our best efforts to fix these problems as fast as possible,' the statement read.
A spokesman for the CFA said that members of the public notified them of the situation on Monday.
'When we discovered the problem we raised our objections with iPhox and told them to correct the mistakes immediately,' he said. 'They said they would correct the mistake in six hours.'
Mainland internet chatrooms were buzzing with criticism of the company yesterday.