Is the Sports Administration Playing the Internet, or Is the Internet Playing the Sports Administration?

Commercializing China's sports industry has been a tug-of-war between market forces and administrative power — profit-seeking companies on one side, the medal-chasing General Administration of Sport on the other.

This summer, the 31st Summer Olympics opens. A scene familiar to Chinese audiences is about to play out again: a medal count that keeps climbing, gold medalists thanking the collective for its support and then a concentrated burst of media exposure — after which most of them return to ordinary life, as if the exposure had never happened.

Athletes here are part of the country's honor system rather than members of a profession, and the body that built and runs the entire athlete system is called the General Administration of Sport. The "gold medal strategy" it has followed for decades keeps the sports industry walled off from market forces. Business is treated as something that could spoil the sanctity of honor, so everyone has been extremely careful about touching it.

For a long time the General Administration of Sport was the only player in Chinese sport, and it had one goal: the Olympics. A state-run system took shape around that goal, built out of junior sports schools, sports bureaus, provincial teams and national teams.

Judging by the medals China's teams have won over the years, the system's success is beyond doubt — but not for the sports industry. More popular sports like soccer and basketball have stayed weak year after year, while the sports that sweep up medals — diving, weightlifting, shooting — come to mind only during the Olympics. The reason is simple: put money into obscure events, where the competition is thinner, and gold is easier to win.

That situation now seems to be changing. Big conglomerates are buying up soccer clubs, and the Chinese Super League has started to look hot, even bubbly. Commercializing the CBA is under negotiation, and it may become the next league to separate governance from operations. Wanda bought World Triathlon Corporation and plans to stage triathlons in China. And as we'll get to, companies from Alibaba to LeEco are putting money into building platforms inside the sports industry.

The point of business is profit. Administrative will inevitably shapes it, but the market eventually brings competition, and some measure of fairness. As more and more companies move into sport, a market may be built once again — outside the General Administration of Sport's state-run system.

We say "once again" because this has happened before. Let's start with a baseball game.

On May 27, the 2016 China Baseball League officially opened.

A four-and-a-half-hour game, a 17-12 scoreline, a cheerleading squad flown in from South Korea — none of it drew a crowd. Spectators seem to have forgotten that a dozen years ago baseball, the fourth sport in China to begin commercializing, had a golden age.

That was 2002. The Chinese Baseball Association approached a company called Dynasty Sports, hoping it could develop the game in China. Behind Dynasty Sports were the American Tom McCarthy and the Japanese-American Jack Sakazaki, who wanted to repeat baseball's success in their two countries.

In the United States, Major League Baseball (MLB) took in as much as $9.6 billion in 2015. Japan's professional baseball league brought in nearly $1.1 billion. As Shen Wei, then chairman of the Chinese Baseball Association, put it: "We plan to use the current league to lay a foundation for baseball, grow a mature market, and promote a professional baseball league when the time is right."

With 60 million yuan from Dynasty Sports, the league expanded fast. Games were broadcast live on television, and CBS came to cover it. Recalling that period, Lü Jiangang, a former member of the Tianjin baseball team, said: "Back then we could fly to away games, and reporters traveled with the team."

The good times didn't last. In 2005, baseball was dropped from the Olympics, and the sport began to fade in China too. In 2011 the league's schedule was cut short. In 2012 the league was suspended. Baseball may be the most profitable league in North America, but here it had lost its value. As Shen Wei put it: "Our country runs an Olympic strategy. After baseball left the Olympics, it stopped getting the same attention as other sports."

This was a telling early clash between a commercial company and the General Administration of Sport in the history of Chinese sports commercialization, and the company lost badly. Dynasty Sports never grasped that the so-called commercialization of baseball in 2002 was, at bottom, still driven by the administration's power. Once the administration stopped supporting the sport because it had been dropped from the Olympics, a game with no grassroots following in China was bound to disappear.

If Dynasty Sports' failure can partly be pinned on a market that was simply too small, Chinese soccer is a tragedy from start to finish.

In 1993, IMG, one of the world's largest sports marketing companies, won the commercial development rights to the Jia-A League, then China's top soccer division. Under IMG the league's brand value rose more than tenfold. In 2001 average attendance at Jia-A matches passed 21,000 — worth noting that average attendance in round 8 of this year's Chinese Super League was only 21,400.

But to the General Administration of Sport, the league was only a tool serving the Olympics or the World Cup. If the league caught on, standards rose and fans loved watching, more money would come in, which could pay for coaches and professional training staff, which would serve the results demanded of the national team at the top of the pyramid. So in 2001 the administration scrapped promotion and relegation in Jia-A to clear the way for World Cup qualifying. Many club general managers objected. The administration pushed ahead anyway.

Chinese soccer became the sacrifice. Results didn't improve, and betting on matches began to spread. As for IMG, it contributed a great deal in the early days of China's sports market, but it was not a successful operator.

This is probably China's standing problem: administrative power outweighs market power, too much interference keeps a market from showing its real shape, and in the end the companies that play by market rules have to leave quietly.

Back to 2016, and things look better. China's soccer fever today owes something to the tastes of senior leaders, but trace it to its source and this wave was created by Evergrande Group.

In 2010, Xu Jiayin, a property developer, entered the soccer business, bringing a lot of money with him. He didn't know the game, but as Evergrande always liked to say: "Chinese soccer was in bad shape. He weighed it up as a businessman, decided it was worth investing in, and did it."

Evergrande ended up creating a model: big capital into the club, strong players signed, results lifted fast, fan spending drawn in. The model looks blunt, but it works, because it follows at least the basic logic of business — supply and demand. No wonder teams like Jiangsu Suning and Shanghai SIPG copied it.

Oddly enough, the fact that soccer has any market at all, far from a mature one, may be thanks to the General Administration of Sport. Thanks to the agency announcing this past February that it was abolishing the "Football Administrative Center of the General Administration of Sport." In theory soccer has now separated from the administration completely and become a de-administered sport, and that is what laid the ground for this round of enthusiasm in the Super League market.

In fact, Chinese sport has tasted de-administration before — handing a commercial company duties that used to belong to the state.

In 2009, Li Na broke away from the National Tennis Administrative Center and quickly signed with IMG, which gave her international services including full marketing support, plus a contract with a guaranteed base income. A year later her game took off and her commercial prospects turned. She finished runner-up at the 2011 Australian Open and then won the French Open. Within weeks of the French Open win, her agent Max Eisenbud had negotiated $48 million in contracts for her. That year her sponsors grew to include Rolex, Häagen-Dazs and Mercedes-Benz; before, there had only been Nike.

By 2012 Li Na had turned 30 — a veteran by any measure. Eisenbud rebuilt her championship team, with core members including himself, her husband Jiang Shan, her coach Carlos and fitness trainer Alex Stober, and helped her win the 2014 Australian Open. As Li Na succeeded, IMG, her agency, took in a handsome income as well.

Now China's sports market has opened up. More and more companies want to take it over the way IMG took over from the tennis center for Li Na.

Evergrande's idea was to use sport's reach to lift its brand. When it won the AFC Champions League in 2013, it rode the moment to launch Evergrande Spring bottled water, and within a month took 5.7 billion yuan in orders nationwide and signed more than 3,000 distributors. Evergrande Spring's sales later slid because the brand's image was muddled, but the platform idea behind it has been picked up by more and more of the big companies pouring into sport.

When it comes to building platforms, no one loves the idea more than Alisports. "We want to build the foundational platform for China's sports industry" was the line Zhang Dazhong, Alisports' CEO, repeated most often when QDaily interviewed him last year.

In practice, Alisports' platform is open to people inside the industry: event organizers can use it to crowdfund and to find sponsors, venues and promotional channels. On the other side, ordinary consumers can enter competitions, challenge strangers to a match, and buy gear and tickets.

All of it is still a nice idea. Of the products Alisports has launched, only two come close: Pingyu Jiayuan, a website built with the Table Tennis and Badminton Administrative Center, and the platform for WESG, the World Electronic Sports Games, which Alisports runs itself. Both currently do nothing but take online entries — a long way from the foundational platform Alisports describes.

Other companies started with running events. Last November, Wanda paid $650 million for World Triathlon Corporation; this year its races come to Xiamen and Hefei. Yao Ming and his Shanghai Sharks gathered the other 17 CBA clubs to form the CBA Alliance company, which intends to take the league's operating rights from the basketball association.

IMG, beaten in soccer and basketball, has found its footing in tennis and golf: it runs the China Open through a joint venture with CCTV, on top of events it operates itself, such as the HSBC Champions golf tournament.

Asked about the logic of buying sports companies, Wang Jianlin once said what mattered most was whether a sport could take root in China. The fattest profits in the whole industry still come from running events, which is why the big companies all want to run events themselves, and want those events held in China.

If you've read QDaily before, you may remember that Ti'ao Dongli, long the producer of the Chinese Super League's broadcast feed, bought the league's broadcast rights for 8 billion yuan over five years; that Tencent, after a 3-billion-yuan deal with the NBA, signed an eight-year agreement with FIBA and brought in ESPN to raise the quality of its coverage; and that LeEco bought the operating rights to the International Champions Cup, city marathons, the Women's Super League and other events.

In broadcasting, LeSports holds rights to more than 300 competitions, the Super League among them. To run all that content it poached Liu Jianhong from CCTV as chief content officer. Besides sponsoring the Wukesong Arena and renaming it LeEco Ecological Center, LeSports has started running smart boxing gyms offline.

It is a broad spread. LeEco and Yongle Culture set up a ticketing company, Lejiale Sports; it went into sports tourism with Caissa Touristic, set up a sports agency of its own, took a stake in Beijing Guoan, and even has a smart-bicycle business.

How far can these companies go? As long as there is a market and there is capital, the game goes on.

What is the General Administration of Sport thinking? From what its internal documents let slip and what it says at press conferences, these partnerships at least give it an expansion of "mass sports" — the phrase it most likes to use and does least about. Or they add a fashionable "Internet Plus" label, as the Table Tennis and Badminton Administrative Center did with Alisports on the Pingyu Jiayuan website.

Meanwhile the machine that runs from the General Administration of Sport down to the local sports bureaus keeps turning. To know whether the mindset has really changed, you may have to watch whether the National Games — an event hardly anyone cares about — is still the priority.

What is different now is that they have money.

We've gone through where each sport stands on marketization. Read on if you're interested.

Soccer

• China Super League Co. — event operations, commercial development
• Ti'ao Dongli — broadcast feed production, rights agency
• LeSports — broadcasting
• Suning, LeEco, Evergrande, SIPG Group, Alibaba and others — club investment

The "Football Administrative Center of the General Administration of Sport" was abolished this past February. But de-administration is not commercialization: the Chinese Football Association still manages and runs China League One, the national team and the like. The Chinese Super League is the only league that has genuinely begun to operate on market terms. Even so, the level of capital activity here is startling.

Capital began entering the Super League on a large scale in 2012. Evergrande Group went first, taking over what was then Guangzhou Pharmaceutical, spending heavily on strong players, carrying Guangzhou Evergrande into the Super League and winning the AFC Champions League twice. Other clubs copied the model one after another: Taobao took a stake in Guangzhou Evergrande, Suning bought Jiangsu Sainty, SIPG Group bought Shanghai Dongya…

Ti'ao Dongli pushed the capital game to its peak. In October 2015 this broadcast-feed producer bid 8 billion yuan to become the Super League's rights partner for the next five years. At 1.6 billion yuan a year the price is very high: China Super League Co., which runs the league, took in only 700 million yuan in all of 2015, and the combined revenue of all 16 Super League clubs that year was only about 2.5 billion yuan.

Basketball

• NBO Sports — event operations
• Infront China, Zhimei Sports — commercial agency
• Li-Ning — title sponsorship
• Jinqiang Group and others — club investment

If all goes well, basketball will be the second Chinese sport to be de-administered, after soccer. Whether the CBA can commercialize smoothly is another matter. The Chinese Basketball Association wants to set up its own CBA company; the CBA Alliance, led by Yao Ming, represents the interests of 18 clubs. There is no shortage of friction between them, and nobody can say what the CBA company will finally look like.

Running the CBA has gone reasonably well, though. Infront China has held the CBA's commercial development rights since 2005, and has been making money on them since 2010: it pays the basketball association 336 million yuan a year, and Li-Ning's 400-million-yuan annual title sponsorship alone covers that, never mind the other tiers of sponsors.

In fact the basketball league furthest along in marketization is not the CBA but the NBL. Founded in 1996, it was in theory supposed to rival the CBA, but years of poor management have left it struggling.

In 2015 the NBL became the first league under the Chinese Basketball Association to separate governance from operations: nine clubs put up the money for Beijing NBO Sports Management to run it. This April the NBL brought in Zhimei Sports for its commercial operations. The 2016 NBL season is under way and has made little noise. What the first basketball league to complete the separation becomes will take time to show.

Volleyball

• Zhongshi Sports — league promotion
• Ouxun Sports / World Window — commercial agency, operations

Volleyball, one of the three big ball sports, has it worse than soccer or basketball. In 2006 the Chinese Volleyball Association signed a ten-year promotion deal with Zhongshi Sports, a CCTV subsidiary. Zhongshi was not a successful promoter: according to an official at the Volleyball Administrative Center, apart from landing title sponsorship it did far too little to package and promote the league.

So in 2016 the association began openly recruiting a commercial operating partner. The latest word is that Sports Window and Ouxun Sports have reached the final round. The first is a venue operator founded in 2001; the second has worked in sports marketing for the past ten years.

But the volleyball league's basic problem is not whether it has a good promoter. It is the structure of the sport. Volleyball clubs today are professional teams under provincial and municipal sports bureaus, and their purpose is still to select athletes for the National Games and the Olympics. Without a market-based system, even the best promoter can do only so much.

Track and Field

• Shimei Sports Culture — event operations
• Zhong'ao Road Running — event operations
• Zhimei Group — event operations

In one sense track and field is the easiest sport to commercialize: move your legs and you're running. That, plus a sharper demand for health in recent years, has made long-distance running, a track-and-field discipline, more and more popular.

Seeing the trend, Du Zhaocai, head of the Track and Field Administrative Center, said in January 2015 that the Chinese Athletics Association would change its management model that year — ending event approvals, loosening the entry conditions for organizing races, simplifying procedures, and encouraging private and social capital to stage events.

In 2015 Zhimei Group ran five marathons, including Guangzhou and Hangzhou, which brought it 345 million yuan in revenue, up more than 36% from the year before. The Chinese Athletics Association itself put up money with China Sports Industry Group to found Zhong'ao Road Running. PPTV has its "Running China" series; Li-Ning has a 10-kilometer road-running league.

According to Zhimei Group president Shen Wei, the gross margin on running a marathon is about 60%. Data from a consulting firm puts revenue from marathon operations in China at 2 billion yuan in 2014. Marathons, in other words, will be a large slice of China's sports industry.

Other track and field events, lacking running's grassroots base, are unlikely to match it.

Table Tennis and Badminton Administrative Center

• Alisports — Pingyu Jiayuan

Like running, table tennis and badminton have the deepest grassroots followings in China. Their commercialization has not gone smoothly either. The Badminton Super League and the Table Tennis Super League are both run by their own associations. Table tennis is in better shape: a season's sponsorship package can sell for tens of millions of yuan. Badminton, for reasons that include no fixed dates, no fixed schedule and no fixed competition format, still cannot find a market.

Liu Xiaonong, head of the Table Tennis and Badminton Administrative Center, has said as much — "the Table Tennis Association running the Super League on its own is certainly not going to work" — but table tennis and badminton are two of China's biggest gold-medal earners at the Olympics, so reform meets heavy resistance.

So the center's route to commercialization runs through mass sports. In April it launched an internet platform with Alisports called Pingyu Jiayuan, roughly "Table Tennis and Badminton Home."

Alisports says Pingyu Jiayuan will reach every part of the two sports — entering tournaments, finding partners to play, booking courts, professional coaching, buying equipment, travel — but the only function open on the site now is tournament entry. Users log in and upload an ID to register as a player on the platform, after which they can sign up for the amateur events run by the Chinese Badminton Association and the Chinese Table Tennis Association.

But does moving a registration system online really count as commercialization?

Boxing and Taekwondo Administrative Center

• Ti'ao Dongli, Ruiyi Culture, Shengli Shijia, Yunnan Zhongwei Boxing — event operations
• Jiurong Lihe — market operations, event operations, athlete representation
• Alisports — event operations, commercial agency

Boxing has been busy lately, and most of it has little to do with the General Administration of Sport. All four of the world's major boxing bodies have found Chinese partners.

This past February, Ti'ao Dongli reached a preliminary agreement with the WBA: WBA China would be set up under license to Ti'ao Dongli, which would run it and organize and promote its events. In September 2015 the IBF announced its China strategy, with Ruiyi Culture and LeSports as partners. The WBC China rankings series was created by Yunnan Zhongwei Boxing Promotions, the WBO China league by Shanghai Shengli Shijia Promotions.

The Chinese Boxing Association has not been idle either. Its two partners are Alisports and Jiurong Lihe. The first signed a comprehensive strategic cooperation framework with the association last year, though the details are unknown. The second will work closely with the national boxing team on market operations, event operations and athlete representation. Jiurong Lihe is also the exclusive commercial operator of the China MMA league.

Taekwondo is much weaker. Only last year did the taekwondo association hold the second National Taekwondo Club League, organized by the taekwondo site Daoba.com. Mature commercial development is not even in view.

Winter Sports

• LeSports, Hualu Baina, Shengli Shijia, Rhine Sports — event operations
• Infront Sports & Media — broadcasting
• Toread — ski resorts
• Huace Film & TV — variety shows

Since Beijing and Zhangjiakou's joint bid for the Winter Olympics succeeded, winter sport has become a national priority — and plenty of people want to make money from the moment.

Infront Sports & Media, which Wanda bought, started with broadcasting. The Winter Olympics has only seven major disciplines, and Infront represents all seven federations; add the Winter Olympics broadcast rights Infront already held, and almost every Winter Olympics event is in Wanda's hands.

With broadcasting taken, the remaining companies can only run events of their own. Some work with government: Hualu Baina, mainly a television drama producer, announced a partnership with the Hebei provincial government to build a series of "ice and snow carnivals" combining extreme winter events, ice-and-snow music festivals, concerts and tourism festivals.

Shengli Shijia signed an agreement with the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau, formally taking over promotion and commercial operations of Air + Style Beijing, the snowboarding event held in the capital for six years running.

LeSports announced a partnership with the Heilongjiang provincial sports bureau. The work will include developing and running ice-and-snow events such as ice-and-snow marathons, ice-and-snow soccer and snowboarding; smart-venue services; an ice-and-snow channel; and O2O services such as ice-and-snow tourism and training.

Some are developing their own events. LeSports staged the X-DRAGON Snow Challenge; Rhine Sports signed a "Strategic Cooperation Framework Agreement" with CCT China GmbH Switzerland, and the two will jointly fund a "winter sports company" to build and run winter sports events across Asia.

Some are betting on ski resorts. Toread plans to open about 20 by 2017, and to run more than 50 in total by 2022.

There is even a push into ice-and-snow variety shows. Huace Film & TV signed with ITV, Britain's largest commercial broadcaster, and put 3 million yuan into Yixiang Bingxue, a company founded by the figure skaters Tong Jian and Pang Qing, to build a high-end service platform for winter sport in China.

Tennis

• IMG — event operations, athlete representation
• Jiushi — event operations
• China Open Co. — event operations

Tennis's rise in China goes back to 2006, when Zheng Jie and Yan Zi won the Australian Open and Wimbledon doubles titles back to back and the idea of China's "Golden Flowers" caught on. After that, Li Na left the administration's control and won two Grand Slam titles and two runner-up finishes, and tennis began to get far more attention.

China's main tennis events are the Shanghai Masters, the China Open, the Guangzhou International Women's Open and the Shenzhen Open. The government is behind all of them, but some commercial companies have joined in.

Shanghai Jiushi runs the Shanghai Masters. Beijing Youth Daily set up China Open Co. in 2003 to run and promote the China Open. In 2009 the China Open also got help from CCTV-IMG Sports Management, a joint venture between CCTV and IMG — though CCTV-IMG soon stopped working on the China Open and moved to the Shenzhen Open instead.

IMG's business in Chinese tennis is not limited to running events.

In 2009, Li Na broke away from the National Tennis Administrative Center and quickly signed with IMG. Under the contract, IMG provided her with international services including full marketing support, and a salary with a guaranteed base income; in return, IMG shared her advertising and endorsement earnings.

A year later Li Na finished runner-up at the 2011 Australian Open and won the French Open, and IMG quickly negotiated $48 million in contracts for her. That year her sponsors grew to include international brands such as Rolex, Häagen-Dazs and Mercedes-Benz; before, there had only been Nike.

After Li Na left the court, IMG planned her business life in retirement too. Her agent Eisenbud has described IMG's plan with Li Na to build a tennis school. The school would come with dining and leisure clubs, a wellness center and a fitness center, plus licensed merchandise designed around her image. It is positioned as a "Li Na Park" on the Disneyland model — a complete sports-and-entertainment business.

Handball, Field Hockey, Baseball and Softball Administrative Center

• Korea Baseball Organization, Major League Baseball — strategic partnership
• Hengda United — event operations

Of these sports, baseball has gone furthest in commercializing. The 2003 attempt was not much of a success, but in 2014 Hengda United Investment became the official operator of China's baseball industry. Behind Hengda United Investment is a company called Jiaheng Jianye, whose main business used to be real estate; it changed its registered scope in October 2014 to become a cultural-industry investment firm.

More dependable partners than Hengda United Investment are the professional leagues themselves. As early as 2010 the Chinese Baseball Association signed an agreement with MLB, which would train players, umpires and coaches. This March the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) also reached a deal with the Chinese side, covering coach and umpire training, youth baseball and professional league operations among other things. The Chinese Baseball Association also hopes to work more closely with Japan's NPB.

Still, Chinese baseball has only just started. Its grassroots base is so thin that any real popularization still looks a long way off.

Gymnastics

• Anta — sponsorship

Gymnastics is in an awkward position. Because it makes such severe demands on the bodies of the people who do it, no country in the world has managed to commercialize it successfully.

That does not mean nobody is interested. A former gymnastics champion, Li Ning has long been the man standing behind the Gymnastics Administrative Center. For more than two decades, from the founding of Li-Ning the company until 2014, Li-Ning sponsored the gymnastics team — until Anta took the sponsorship away from Li-Ning for 50 million yuan in 2014.

Cycling and Fencing Administrative Center

• Yingdong Sports — event marketing
• Wanda — event operations
• Hong Kong Jockey Club — event operations

The Cycling and Fencing Administrative Center oversees five sports: fencing, cycling, equestrian, modern pentathlon and triathlon.

Yingdong Sports, a company in the fencing business, signed with the Chinese Fencing Association to become its official promotion partner. The Hong Kong Jockey Club signed with the Chinese Equestrian Association to help with some event operations.

Besides these companies working with official bodies, there is Wanda. After paying $650 million for World Triathlon Corporation, Wanda signed an agreement with the city of Xiamen on Ironman-branded races. A half-Ironman will be held in Xiamen in November 2016, and a full Ironman may follow in 2017.

Automobile and Motorcycle Sports Administrative Center

• China Vision Global Auto Sports Management, Jiushi Corporation — event operations

Jiushi Corporation runs the Shanghai round of F1 and also maintains the circuit. Because the early planning for F1 here had no clear method, the Shanghai round has never really counted as a success.

China Vision Global Auto Sports Management, a CCTV subsidiary, reached an agreement with the General Administration of Sport's Automobile and Motorcycle Sports Administrative Center and is responsible for developing, running and promoting motorsports events. The annual Silk Road China Rally is theirs.

Shooting and Archery Administrative Center, Weightlifting, Wrestling and Judo Administrative Center

These sports win China plenty of Olympic medals, and commercialization for all of them is an uphill slog.

Commercializing weightlifting is hard everywhere in the world. At the 2015 IWF Grand Prix in Fuzhou last September, the winner's prize was only $8,000. The sport's own high barrier to entry is the biggest obstacle.

Small clubs around the country let people try shooting, archery and judo, but that is still a very long way from an industry.

Swimming Administrative Center, Aquatic Sports Administrative Center

• Geely, Zoke, Sifang — sponsorship

From Tian Liang early on to Sun Yang and Ning Zetao more recently, China's swimming and diving teams have supplied the entertainment world with a good many stars over the past few years, and those stars have drawn a good deal of endorsement and sponsorship money. What happens to them is more or less a replica of what has happened to the commercialization of swimming and the related water sports. The national swimming team has sponsorship from Geely, Zoke and Sifang.

As for commercial events, there are about as many as the swimming pools around the country put on.

Small Ball Sports Administrative Center

• WSG, Zhong'ao Sports — event operations
• IMG — event operations, athlete representation

Some of the sports under the Small Ball Sports Administrative Center are highly commercialized worldwide — golf and cue sports, for instance.

Golf's position in China is awkward. As a "sport of the elite" it has become tangled up with the anti-corruption campaign, and it has set off all kinds of environmental disputes, so the sport has always had a bumpy ride here.

In 2005, World Sports Group (WSG) funded and staged the men's China Golf Tour. But a weak foundation, an unreasonable schedule and years of losses made the tour disappear altogether by 2009.

The PGA Tour came to China in 2014, but neither ticket revenue nor broadcast revenue met expectations, and sponsors were unwilling to spend. "Very hard" is the verdict of Sun Liping, president of Zhong'ao Sports, which runs and promotes the PGA Tour China Series.

Only IMG, which signs golfers, seems to be doing fine. Feng Shanshan, Liang Wenchong, Lin Xiyu, Liu Yu and Shi Yuting are all IMG players. They are the most important part of IMG's golf income.

Cue sports, snooker above all, have plenty of fans in China. Ding Junhui, just runner-up at the World Snooker Championship, was many people's introduction to the game. Yet the Shanghai Masters snooker event is still a government-run tournament, and after a hot few years snooker's popularity has cooled, with fewer television stations broadcasting it and even the press covering it nearly gone.

How to make snooker hot again, instead of leaving it in one pool hall after another, is the question any company that wants into the sport has to answer.