China’s men’s national soccer team faces criticism from fans after humiliating defeat to arch-rivals Japan

China’s men’s national soccer team lost 7-0 to arch-rivals Japan on Thursday night, a new record for a country so fascinated by soccer, where the game has been marred by corruption scandals and declining form.

Players from Europe’s top leagues led the way for Japan, with Liverpool’s Wataru Endo and Brighton’s Kaoru Mitoma scoring in a demolition at Saitama Stadium, north of Tokyo, in the Asian qualifiers for the final round of the 2026 World Cup. Monaco’s Takumi Minamino also scored twice.

“This is humiliating,” one Chin fan wrote on social media platform Weibo, where the defeat became a trending topic and had more than 460 million views by Friday morning.

The fact that the defeat came at the hands of Japan adds to the pain of Chinese fans. Sporting rivalries between the two countries often carry overtones of their historical relationship, strained by, among other things, Japan’s brutal occupation of China in the first half of the 20th century and the current dispute over sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands, which China calls the Diaoyus.

“This is the most shameful day for Chinese football,” another fan wrote on Weibo after the defeat, calling it “a day that will forever hurt Chinese fans” and “a pain that can never be erased.”

Another angry fan demanded the team be removed, writing: “This is hopeless… This needs to be abandoned!”

Over the past decade, Chinese football officials – including leader Xi Jinping – have expressed ambitions to enter the sport’s upper echelons, with the Chinese domestic league becoming a magnet for big-name players.

But the Chinese Super League has lost its lustre in recent years – partly due to the broader economic slowdown and the government’s unusually strict response to Covid – while the national team has struggled. Earlier this year, the team crashed out in the group stage of the Asian Cup in Qatar, failing to score a single goal in three matches.

These factors are compounded by a massive corruption scandal.

In March, Chinese courts sentenced some of the country’s most prominent soccer officials to prison in an anti-corruption crackdown. Those implicated in the investigation included former soccer association chief Chen Xuyuan and Li Tie, a former English Premier League player at Everton and a former Chinese national team coach.

During Thursday’s match, Japan – ranked 18th in the world – will be able to count on the presence of several well-known faces playing in top foreign football leagues.

In addition to Mitoma, Endo and Minamino, the other scorers were Celtic’s Daizen Maeda, Reims’ Junya Ito and Takefusa Kubo, who plays in Spain for Real Sociedad.

Former player Fan Zhiyi, who has been called a pioneer because he was one of the first Chinese players to play in the English top flight in the 1990s, said the defeat was predictable but not that much so.

“The fans are having a hard time accepting that we lost like this,” the current football coach wrote on Weibo, adding that the result shows that “the World Cup is too far away.”

China striker Zhang Yuning spoke after the match and admitted defeat but promised to improve in the next match.

“We need to address this so we can play better when we get back to our home turf,” he said.

The Chinese team, ranked 87th in the world, will play against Roberto Mancini’s Saudi Arabia in Dalian on September 10.

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