In the spring of 2023, the Hubei Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection and Supervision Committee website released heavy news that Yu Hongchen, the president of the Chinese Athletics Association, was suspected of major disciplinary violations and was undergoing an in-depth review by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection's Discipline Inspection and Supervision Group of the State General Administration of Sport and Hubei Provincial Supervision Committee.
Since last year, this incident has been like a blackout storm in soccer, affecting many key figures, which has reached as many as eight.
Back in 2006, Yu Hongchen was associated with Chinese soccer, when he was the deputy director of the Beijing Olympic Games Preparation Office, and in 2009, an anti-gambling storm swept through the soccer world, with several members of the Football Association's leadership implicated in the investigation. During his tenure as deputy director of the Football Management Center, Yu Hongchen said bluntly that "the mistakes made by the industry's top leaders are heartbreaking".
At the end of 2015, Yu Hongchen ceased to be a vice-chairman of the Football Association and became a full-time member of the executive committee instead.In August 2017, he left the soccer field.
Yu Hongchen's departure coincides with the launch of an innovative strategy by the FA aimed at ensuring that young players under the age of 23 are on the pitch.
If you can't play, you can't play, and that phrase seems to have become a reflection of Yu Hongchen's soccer career.
In 2006, the Shandong Luneng to 4.1 million yuan to rent Wang Hao, triggered a dispute about the Super League. Cai Zhenhua, then the "head of the national ball game", blamed the fiasco on the "nonchalance" of some clubs.
In 2009, China's soccer crackdown saw Shandong Luneng caught by the Football Association. However, this did not affect the club too much.
In the fifth round of the 2010 Chinese Super League, Shandong Luneng hosted Liaoning Hongyun, and a controversial battle about "offside" broke out.
At that time, the Football Association changed the referee customization to a lottery system, resulting in a large number of new referees with substandard business level and inexperience being pushed into the first line of the Chinese Super League.
In the 2011 Chinese Super League (CSL), referee Ma Ning made several controversial calls during the match between Shandong Luneng and Tianjin Kangshi, which ended in a draw.
In early 2013, the national soccer team played a warm-up match against Oman, and the injured national soccer team lost by a single goal, casting a shadow over the Asian preliminaries challenge away to Saudi Arabia.
However, Zhang Linpeng and Rong Hao, who had withdrawn from the national soccer team's training due to injuries, appeared to make their debuts in the warm-up match between Guangzhou Evergrande and Romania's Rapid Bucharest, who were training in Spain a few hours after the national soccer team's warm-up match.
Such an event happened again in 2019. Lippi's second entry lists international players. Guangzhou Evergrande remains the international players. Xu Xin, Huang Bowen and Wei Shihao were injured and left the training squad, while Ji Zhongguo and Wang Ziming were selected as substitutes.
Just three days later, three Hangzhou national players, who had previously withdrawn from the national training due to injuries, all appeared in the battle against Shanghai Harbor in the Tianwangshan Mountain and eventually won.
Yu Hongchen was investigated, the most striking place is also "Hubei", which is the starting point of all the storm.
Six years after leaving the company, he is still under arrest. Compared to Chen Xuyuan, who has only been in the federation for three and a half years, Hongchen will be involved in more people and events from the federation to the president of the Athletic Association, whether it is the initial management of the league or the later connection with Evergrande.
This soccer anti-corruption campaign seems to have gone beyond the FA level and is extending in a wider direction and is far from over.
For more than a hundred days, under the magic and irony, all kinds of bad habits in Chinese soccer have been uprooted from youth soccer, professional soccer to the national team.
In a way, this explains why Chinese soccer has not taken off over the years, instead sinking in a cycle.
