A year before the ardent football fan Xi Jinping became China’s president, he had already made it clear that decades of underachievement in the sport by the world’s most populous country had to end.
In 2011, Xi told a politician from South Korea, a much smaller neighbour with a much better footballing record, that he had three wishes: for China to qualify for the World Cup for the first time since its 2002 debut, then to host the tournament and, eventually, to win it.
