Play to keep it healthy

Lifting of government hold on sports will attract the widerpopulation to games and foster common people's interest

By intensifying its crackdown against corruption in recent weeks, the Chinese Football Association (CFA) showed its intent to wipe the soccer industry's grubby slate clean before the start of the new Super League season over the weekend. The detention of several high-ranking CFA officials in January was followed by the arrest of three award-winning referees for allegedly taking up to 400,000 yuan in bribe to fix just one game.

But while such remedies are welcome, they are not strong enough to cure the ailing reputation of the game in China or to mask the undeniable failure of the country's soccer industry as a whole. The Chinese soccer league has failed to produce a national team capable of taking on good teams. It has also failed to provide quality - and most crucially fair - games for fans, whose numbers exploded in the first few years of professionalization in the 1990s, only to plunge into freefall in recent years.