Scoring goals and saving face: why world football needs to get to grips with China’s culture
Saving face is an important aspect of China’s culture which applies both on-field and off. With increasing Chinese ownership of clubs worldwide, it’s a concept football fans need to understand
In a recent English Premier League football game at Stamford Bridge in London, Spanish international Cesc Fabregas scored a goal for the home team Chelsea against one of his former clubs, Arsenal. Aside from the quality of Fabregas’ goal, the most notable feature of it was that he refused to celebrate in front of Arsenal fans with whom he had previously had a good relationship.
Perhaps; although Fabregas may have unwittingly marked himself out as a potential future signing for a Chinese Super League club. What he did was something that many people in China may have found admirable or, possibly, just normal. Indeed, what the Anglo-centric rant of an English columnist has done is yet again accentuate some of the cultural differences between Europe and China, which those who have a stake in football should understand.
His club issued a statement after the dismissal which said, “Qinsheng [will be] asked to make a public apology in front of the whole team and he will report to the reserve team and train with them from today ... taking his attitude and future behaviour into consideration, the club will cut his salary to a certain extent.”
These two examples, whilst helping to illustrate the notion of face, nevertheless reveal that the phenomenon is a more subtly complex one than the examples themselves actually suggest. At one level face is about an individual’s prestige, which they may feel is deserved given their position or status. This suggests that a player heading to China from a big European football league such as Serie A or La Liga, even if they were never especially accomplished players, might be justified in receiving respect and therefore have a right to expect that their face is protected.
In the same way, a manager or coach may believe their position to be worthy of respect and that others therefore ought to show regard for their face, even if their successes were in the past. Face also extends to groups and the amount of respect someone gives to collections of significant others. The Fabregas and Sheng incidents are examples of this – fans and teammates. Yet there are other potential examples that might become apparent in football, for example in relationships between younger players and older players, clubs and commercial partners, and possibly even hooligans and players.
However, at Den Haag in Holland, the fan/club relationship has been rather more fractious. Following the club’s acquisition by a wealthy Chinese businessman called Wang Hui, it seemed to lurch from one crisis to another. Den Haag’s Dutch fans will presumably claim this was due to Wang’s management of the club, although one senses that the problems may have had some of their origins in issues of face.
Indeed, the chairman of Den Haag’s fan association, Jacco van Leeuwen, is on record as having said “[in our town] the character of the people is that when you don’t like it, you say it directly; you don’t hide.” Such views are inconsistent with the likes of Wang keeping face and may account for the subsequent antagonism between the football club’s fans and its owner. What might have seemed like honesty and openness to the Dutch, may nevertheless have been interpreted by Wang as a loss of face.
Trying to understand face in a cross-cultural context is therefore both difficult and problematic. However, with China looking overseas for investments to sustain its interest in football, and with the likes of Europeans looking to China as a source of business, then we are likely to see people and organisations continuing to lose face for some time to come.
This piece is published in partnership with Policy Forum, an academic blog based at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy.