Chinese football

Saturday I watched a football match at the Olympic stadium in Wuhu. Yes, Wuhu has an Olympic stadium with a surprising capacity of about 25 thousand seats. I had been to this stadium once before on a Monday afternoon to see how it looked like, and to my surprise I could just walk inside and take a look. Which surprised me because I expected a big stadium to be closed for visitors without any purpose of being there. The stadium looked a lot better than I expected and I decided that I wanted to see at least one match here, just to see what it was like in China. In China football is not very popular, so I couldn’t really imagine how a match would be.

The stadium is quite new and I guess it’s been build to hold the regional qualification matches for the Beijing Olympics. Wuhu is the second city of the Anhui province and has a central location in Anhui, so it makes some sense to put a big stadium here. Although it seems that this stadium was very useful for those provincial qualification matches, the stadium seems a bit useless today. Today this place is only used a couple of times a year as a football stadium, a few times to hold a concert and on a as good as daily basis to play golf. (the last thing I still have to see, but I’ve been told that they use it as place to play golf in.) Golf is quite popular among the rich Chinese, so it could be. But personally, I do think that a football stadium is not really a place to play golf in. Didn’t you need very short grass to play golf?


We were extremely early at the stadium, because I was together with Peter who speaks even worse Chinese as I do, so none of us could figure out what time the match would start, which implied that we were at the stadium 3 hours prior to the match. This didn’t really bother us cause now we had more than enough time to check out the surroundings and to have lunch before the match started. When we got back to the stadium one hour before the match, the ambience outside the stadium was a bit disappointing. It made me think that I finally found a place which was not completely crowded with people in China.

One hour before the match there were a few fanatic fans, some police and a some volunteers around the stadium. The fanatic fans were quite friendly and there was even someone who could speak a little English. Because they had two tickets left they invited us to join them in the stadium. Their tickets were half the price we paid for our tickets because their seats where in the sun and ours where in the shadow. However I’m very glad we went with them, because the rest of the stadium was quite boring. And since the match was very bad as well, now at least we had something to see. The stadium was like I said a nice place and it would definitely not misfit in the Dutch competition. In my opinion it was a lot better looking than the one they have in Eindhoven. But the problem is that it was very empty during the match. The stadium has about 25 thousand seats, but I guess only 5 thousand people turned up to watch the match, if not less.

The fanatic supporters were with only about 50 man, and they seemed like a bad copy of European supporters. They wore the blue Anhui jersey and they song a lot, but all in all it felt a bit sad. I’m not sure if it was because it felt like copied fan behavior or if it was because the football itself was so bad, that I can’t imagine them having any real feelings for it, but it was just strange to see despite their enthusiasm. Being a fan of Ajax I thought, I had not really been spoiled with great football nor prizes the last couple of years. Well, compared to this, I was wrong. It was very bad football and I was glad that we choose to sit with the fanatic supporters cause their behavior was a lot more interesting than the match itself. It was also interesting to see that there were no stewards in the stadium, there were only volunteers, who were students and I wonder how voluntary they actually where. Apart from them there were police officers, who didn’t seem to do anything, they placed a camera towards the fanatic supporters, but apart from that they just said down, smoked cigarettes and made calls on their mobile phones.

The foreign star of the Anhui team comes from Brasil and is called Renaldo, I'm not joking you.

The match was between the Anhui team and a team from Beijing. The Anhui team won the match 3 - 2 so everybody was happy, because there were no fans from the Beijing team in the stadium. The difference could have been bigger, but the Anhui team scored an own goal in the last 5 minutes and wasted a lot of good opportunities to score. All in all it was an entertaining day at the stadium and it was very interesting to see a football match in China.