NBA not only ones looking for next Yao Ming as other sports still hope to cash in on China

Bayern Munich chief’s reaffirmation of club’s desire for a Chinese player shows that priorities have not changed in China market
Houston Rockets hall-of-famer remains the ideal across all sport – and that model has expanded to India approach

Jonathan White

Published: 3:00pm, 2 Aug 2020

Why you can trust SCMP

The “Chinese dream” is an idea that has come to embody Xi Jinping’s time at the helm. Essentially, “the American dream with Chinese characteristics”, it has been synonymous with the expansion of the country’s middle class over the last decade.

Social transformation and economic progress has been the hallmark of the last few decades of China and it is no coincidence that the dispersal of disposable income has seen the rapid rise of interest from Western sports leagues and their individual teams.

They all have a rather different “Chinese dream” – to get a star player from China into their team. Call it the “Yao Ming effect”.

The NBA got a jump on their rivals with the arrival of the big man in the 2002 draft but they have not managed to replicate it since. Yi Jianlian, Sun Yue and Zhou Qi followed, while Ding Yanyuhang and Guo Ailun tried and failed to make the draft.

People walk past the NBA store in Beijing in October 2019. Photo: AFP

Even if you allow Sun “winning” a championship with the Los Angeles Lakers, there has been nothing like the sustained success of Yao’s eight seasons with the Houston Rockets since he hung up his size 18s.

Lord knows the NBA would have liked another Yao when their relationship with China went awry last October following Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey’s swiftly deleted tweet supporting anti-government protesters in Hong Kong. The debate over NBA-China ties rages on and has been even more politicised in the months since. So much for ping-pong diplomacy, now it’s NBA enmity.

Academies not 'fairy dust' needed to find the next Yao Ming in China, says NBA's Silver

CCTV is still refusing to broadcast NBA games even since the restart while Yao’s former team are still cancelled from the Chinese internet and online streaming.

US politicians have asked questions of NBA commissioner Adam Silver and the league’s relationship to China referencing human rights abuses of Uygurs in Xinjiang and the ongoing situation in Hong Kong. Now the NBA has announced it cut ties with its academy in Xinjiang over a year ago – before reports this week of athletes being abused at their China academies in Urumqi, Jinan and Hangzhou.

Despite all the rancour and furore, the NBA has stood firmer than Yao did as Rockets centre. They have not pulled out of China and still the other academies continue.

Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Yao Ming speaks during his induction ceremony in 2016. Photo: AP

“Find another Yao,” was their task when they were set up, according to two former employees who spoke to ESPN this week.

The NBA is not the only league to want its own Chinese superstar as German Bundesliga champions Bayern Munich reiterated this week.

Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, the chairman of the Bavarian behemoth, said as much to Xinhua: “We are ready to sign players from China and are very much looking forward to it.”

Bayern Munich’s Rummenigge confirms hopes for first Chinese player

Despite past searches for talent coming up short, the German champions press on with their academies.

“We have built four football academies in China and my philosophy is that there will be a Chinese player at Bayern at some stage. And there will be a lot of interest when we have this Chinese player,” then Bayern president Uli Hoeness told German media in 2017.

“If we then probably play at two o’clock on Saturday so that we can broadcast live in prime time in Shanghai or Beijing, then 300 million Chinese will press on their iPhone and pay one euro each,” he said.

Chinese boys take part in a Bayern Munich coaching session at the opening ceremony of the club’s Shanghai office in 2017. Photo: AFP

Many European clubs have adopted the same approach of developing Chinese players in the hope of unearthing a gem, such as Barcelona.

“I am confident that all the work in our academies can have a result. In 10 years I think we can have players from Asia in the Barca team,” Barcelona CEO Oscar Grau told the Post last year.

“It will help,” if they were Chinese, he said. “I’m sure the audience will be higher and it will help the sponsor to be closer. We will see.”

Barcelona hand-picked three Chinese children for the famous La Masia youth academy in Spain from their academy set-up at Mission Hills in Haikou in 2017. Mission Hills is also the home of the first NBA school in China, launched by Kobe Bryant in 2017.

The MLB announced a China academy deal in 2017, the NFL announced China’s Li Boqiao as one of nine players to make its 2020 International Player Pathway Program last December.

It is not just China, of course. The rupee is almost as attractive as the yuan in the West.

Million Dollar Arm, a 2014 film, tells the true story of the first Indians to sign for an MLB side. Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel were spotted by a sports agent after winning a reality show, they were eventually signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates and have since been released.

Satnam Singh, the first Indian to be drafted into the NBA by the Dallas Mavericks in 2015, was the subject of the 2016 Netflix documentary One in a Billion. Yao was mentioned as the touchstone throughout.

It is reassuring to know that despite the worst global pandemic since the Spanish Flu and a geopolitical situation that threatens to make even the most fearmongering 1980s Cold War cinema look tame, the Chinese dream is still in business.

Post