Li Tie, former coach of the Chinese national team who once played for the Everton Football Club in the English Premier League, has been jailed in China for 20 years on bribery charges as part of a crackdown on corruption in sport.
He was sentenced at a court in the province of Hubei on Friday, after being found guilty of a string of offences relating to giving and receiving bribes.
The court said that the 47-year-old, by far the biggest sporting name netted in the sweeping crackdown, had handled bribes totalling 120 million yuan ($16.5m) between 2015 and 2021, a period including his two-year tenure as national coach.
Li submitted a guilty plea in court back in March, but had earlier confessed to arranging nearly $421,000 in bribes to secure the job of national coach and to fix Chinese Super League matches in a documentary aired by the CCTV broadcaster in January.
CCTV occasionally airs confessions by criminal suspects before they have appeared in court, a practice widely condemned by rights groups.
Poor performance
Chinese football has grappled with match-fixing and corruption since at least the late 1990s, with local fans blaming corruption for the continuing poor performance of the national team.
President Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaign has also seen former Chinese Football Association (CFA) chief Chen Xuyuan sentenced to life in prison earlier this year for taking bribes worth more than 81 million yuan ($11m).
As part of the crackdown, several other top football officials have been sentenced this year to terms ranging from 30 months to 14 years.
In September, the CFA issued life bans to 38 players and five club officials after a two-year investigation into match-fixing and gambling.
The investigation found that 120 matches had been fixed with 41 football clubs involved.
Xi is a self-proclaimed football fan who wants China to host and win the World Cup one day, but the men’s national team has long failed to impress.
FIFA currently ranks China 90th in the world, one place above the tiny Caribbean island of Curacao.
