Belt and Road extends to sport: DDMC chief lets it slip, US$4 billion AFC deal may be part of China’s plan to control world football
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“We see this partnership as an opportunity for DDMC to carry out the important ‘Belt and Road’ strategy,” Yi said at the signing ceremony in Kuala Lumpur.
Much can be gleaned from Yi’s linking of the football deal to President Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) – China’s multibillion-dollar grand plan to provide infrastructure development across the globe but which has also been criticised as a form of financial colonialism on countries who are unable to pay their debts.
The link may be sending a message that DDMC, which is said to have struggled to pay the first two tranches of its reported US$4 billion commitment to the AFC from 2021 to 2028, will be protected from going down in the same way that Europe-based, China majority-owned MP Silva – previously the world’s biggest sports marketing company – went into administration last month because of a lack of funding.
“At one level, my feeling is this is a cunning political sleight of hand on the part of DDMC,” said Simon Chadwick, professor of sports enterprise at Salford Business School. “Over the last 18 months, the Chinese government has been clamping down on what it believes to be errant investments in football, especially when they have an overseas dimension.
“As such, Beijing issued a diktat in which it was stated that future football investments must be connected to BRI. Hence, it appears that DDMC may have packaged and positioned the deal in order to ensure that it survived the scrutiny of China’s authorities.