Chinese soccer fans are filled with renewed excitement as they eye the road to the next FIFA World Cup following an impressive performance at the 2015 Asian Cup last January. Qualifying matches for Asian countries are set to begin on June 16, with China’s first match against Hong Kong, which has its own team.
With expectations running high, China FA is heeding fans to be wary of the competition with a set of new posters it has released which promote the upcoming matches. The posters are designed to display a sense of disrespect towards China’s soccer adversaries, taking potshots at them that run the gamut from being amibiguously racist to topically irreverent.
The poster promoting China’s match with its “other system”, the Hong Kong SAR, is translated as follows:
Don’t underestimate any opponent. This team has black skin, yellow skin and white skin people. Playing a team with such diverse background, you’d better be prepared.
As CFA said on its official WeChat account, the poster was meant to highlight Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan and “open and inclusive” nature that has made the team an “international brigade”. But the poster doesn’t say that — rather, it just features a picture of several men with different complexions. The Hong Kong Football association put a poster on its Facebook page yesterday that said: “Avoid being despised. Our team has dark-skinned, yellow-skinned and white-skinned players united by a common goal: to teach, to stand up for Hong Kong. You as fellow Hongkongers must stand with us.”
The Hong Kong poster isn’t the only questionable one, though. The poster for the China vs Maldives match features a “Charlie’s Angels” pose from three men in suits:
Hearing their captain said they want to beat China to secure second place in the group. Playing such a proud yet frail team, you’d better be prepared.
This is the poster for China’s match with Bhutan in which the captain’s other job as an airplane pilot is highlighted, as seen in the illustration:
After the game someone from their team will go back to fly an airplane. duang! Playing a team like this, you’d better be prepared.
“Duang” is a word made up and used online that denotes surprise through the use of special effects, and is similar to the English phrases “Ta da!” or “Presto!”
Here’s the poster for the Qatar match that features an illustration of three men dressed as hip-hop gangsters:
They are well-known for having so many naturalised reinforcements. Playing such a wealthy team you’d better be prepared.
Overconfidence crashed the wave of euphoria that swept China into the Asian Cup semi-finals. As for the World Cup qualifiers, we can only guess how the Chinese national team will do against airplane captains and mixed-race teams.