Opinion | Why Serie A still has hold in China: a nostalgic and fickle fan base offers lessons for Europe’s football clubs
China was awash with European football clubs visiting this pre-season, but did the visits lead to sustained popularity among Chinese fans schooled in Serie A?
Several years ago, a post-graduate student and I surveyed 16,000 Chinese football fans. In our research, we essentially asked three questions: which national team do you support, which club team do you support and, in both cases, why?
The most common answers we received were: Germany, Arsenal and a multitude of accompanying motives including a history of team success, star performers, and the fact that some decent German players have recently played for one of the English Premier League’s London-based teams.
China’s preoccupation with Germany was borne-out earlier this year by Shanghai-based research company Mailman’s findings that Bayern Munich remains the most popular football club on Chinese social media.
If further evidence was needed of heavy flirting between the two countries, look no further than Xi Jinping and Angela Merkel’s recent giggle-fest at a children’s football match in Berlin involving the two nations.
It was therefore something of a surprise this summer that as Arsenal, Chelsea, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund all headed to China, it was the English teams that came out on top.
A kindly, somewhat perseverant, soul brought it to my attention on social media that games involving German teams had been poorly attended affairs.
