A Football Match Canceled Five Hours Before Kickoff — Why It's the Most Embarrassing Friendly in History

Heavy rain, sweltering heat, deception and cover-ups — and an organizer cashing out at any cost.

At 2:40 pm on July 25, when a push notification landed saying the Manchester derby had been canceled because of the weather, most people's first reaction was that it couldn't be true.

"That's impossible. I took the high-speed train all day to get here from out of town, and the weather in Beijing is fine right now." A user going by ggmm had just reached the hotel after a full day on the train, and before getting on the Wi-Fi used mobile data to upload a photo — on crutches, in Beijing for the match.

The official word came fast. At 2:50 pm, Manchester United and Manchester City posted statements on Twitter, one after the other, announcing that their International Champions Cup match in China had been called off.

At 3:04 pm, the ICC's official WeChat account published a notice: the match was canceled "because of weather conditions," "to ensure the safety of players and fans," and "in a joint decision with Manchester United and Manchester City." A press briefing would follow at 4:30 pm.

But as word spread that the match was off for good, with no new date, so did another explanation: the real reason was that the turf at the Bird's Nest was so bad it had failed both clubs' inspections.

At 4:51 pm, the Weibo account Real Madrid News, which has 1.45 million followers, posted that it had run into Manchester United fans on the subway still heading to the Bird's Nest, and closed with the hashtag #HeartbreakingForFans#.

Outside the Bird's Nest, where the match should have been played, crowds of fans refused to leave. Many had come from all over the country and from abroad, and they kept refreshing their phones, hoping for a reversal.

A Manchester United fan from Henan said he had begun planning the trip to Beijing back in March, when the club announced its China tour: fighting for tickets, asking for time off, buying train tickets, booking a hotel. He had been looking forward to it for nearly half a year.

By the organizer's own count, about 55,000 fans had bought tickets — sponsor tickets not included — and more than half came from outside Beijing: from Guangdong and Guangxi in the far south, Qinghai and Xinjiang in the west, and the three northeastern provinces in the far north.

Because the match fell on a weekday, many fans had taken annual leave to attend. Some never even laid eyes on the Manchester United players: when the organizer canceled the derby, a share of them were still on their way to Beijing.

A Manchester United fan who had come from Chongqing demanded an answer, loudly. It had been raining in Beijing for days; if the organizer already knew the pitch was a problem, why announce it only at three in the afternoon? How much would fans have been spared if the match had been called off a day earlier? He stood outside the Bird's Nest and would not go until someone explained.

Whether or not you support Manchester United or Manchester City, this was shocking and painful for any fan. And if you don't follow football at all, you should still know that it was deeply embarrassing.

Search "friendly canceled" and nearly everything that comes back involves bomb threats, civil unrest, or terrorist attacks. This one was called off hours before kickoff because the turf was too poor — and the blame pointed straight at the organizer.

You can imagine the hard bargaining and the stalling behind that: knowing the rain had ruined the turf, and still waiting until five hours before kickoff to announce.

An insider at the organizer told reporters: "We kept thinking there was still hope. Actually, if it had been a Chinese team, the match really could have gone ahead — but this was a foreign club. The Bird's Nest side also thought the pitch was playable, but it was the clubs' decision, and there was nothing we could do."

In fact the organizer, LeTV Sports, hadn't given Manchester United and Manchester City much time to prepare either. The day before the match, the teams' training session at the Bird's Nest — the walkaround meant to let them get a feel for the pitch — was moved at the last minute to the nearby Olympic Sports Center. The result: on the morning of the match, officials from both clubs pulled back the plastic sheeting covering the pitch, took a look, and settled it. The field wasn't fit to play on.

By the organizer's own account, the final call wasn't made by the head coaches but by experts — pitch officials from Manchester City and Manchester United. "They came to look every day, but earlier, when it was raining, they didn't come as often, and with standing water on the pitch they couldn't look at it closely. Today they came in the morning and again in the afternoon. It was sunny this morning and we were all so happy…"

So the cover-up ran out of room. You can't expect two squads whose players are worth an average of £15 million each (about 130 million yuan) to play on a vegetable patch just because kickoff is a few hours away.

No professional, responsible manager would let his players run a fast, physical football match on a pitch that can't guarantee their safety — least of all the hard-nosed José Mourinho, backed by one of the strongest and most assertive clubs in the world.

At the press conference the day before, you could already feel that the Portuguese manager's patience with the whole China trip had run out.

"This pitch is terrible. Our players' bodies matter far more than the result [of tomorrow night's match]." A day before kickoff, the Manchester United manager was still stressing that he had no way to forfeit or refuse to play. "So we will play and hope we get lucky. Normally when we say a lucky match we mean a good result. But the 'good result' I want tomorrow night is every one of my players going home in one piece."

It was only a commercial friendly, but a manager saying outright, before the match, that he cared nothing about winning and only about getting everyone through intact was still startling in its bluntness.

This Manchester United–Manchester City fixture had been loaded with extra meaning. It was the first time the two rival clubs, with their long-running local derby, would meet outside Britain. It was also the first time Mourinho and Pep Guardiola, two of the world's top managers, had faced each other since taking their new jobs.

Chaotic organization forced Mourinho's press conference out of the briefing room and into the open air, where in 40-degree Celsius heat it lasted all of ten minutes. The one thing people remember is Mourinho repeating, impatiently, that what he wanted most was to "take a complete Manchester United back to Manchester": "Tomorrow is the last day, and then it's over!"

You can understand Mourinho's anger. The preseason schedule had been set before he ever took the job.

For a storied club that has become a global sporting brand, balancing commercial deals against players' preparation is a problem every Manchester United manager inherits. Alex Ferguson, the club's most decorated manager, often complained about long-haul commercial tours, and Mourinho's predecessor, Louis van Gaal, tried to stop the trip to China before he was fired — and we all know how that ended.

Britain's Daily Mirror called it possibly the worst preseason preparation in Manchester United's history. The club played only one match in China, losing 1-4 to Borussia Dortmund. Then came an emergency landing, a change of training venue, a run of commercial appearances in 40-degree heat, and a press conference in a briefing room with no air conditioning.

The whole Manchester United squad set off out of China that same night and reached Manchester at 5 am. Through all of it Chinese fans kept watch outside the team hotel, chased the team bus late into the night, and called out players' names as the team pulled away.

Fans may not see the club again for a while. Given Manchester United's global strategy, and especially after a week this unpleasant, it is hard to imagine the club planning another China trip any time soon.

China is not short of experience hosting commercial matches. In 1995 Arsenal played Beijing Guoan at the Workers' Stadium, the earliest prototype of a commercial match in China. Real Madrid's 2003 visit was what truly set the Chinese market alight — the Galácticos emptied the streets wherever they went. Barcelona came twice, in 2007 and 2010, to play friendlies against Beijing Guoan, and the 2010 match was held at the Bird's Nest, the national stadium. In 2012, Arsenal, Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Juventus and Napoli all visited in turn. For one Arsenal–Manchester City match, the organizing company spent close to a million yuan laying fresh turf at the Bird's Nest — hardly top grade, but it passed both teams' pre-match inspection.

In recent years, though, European clubs' appetite for preseason friendlies in China has clearly cooled; many now skip China for Japan, North America, or even Singapore, whose national team ranks below China's. Amateurish handling by some domestic operators has burned enough European giants that they keep the Chinese market at arm's length. For last year's Italian Super Cup, Lazio and Juventus flew in high-quality turf to guarantee pitch quality and player safety, and that solved the venue problem.

Nor is the Bird's Nest's crowded schedule of concerts and shows an excuse for bad turf, because every decent professional stadium in the world faces the same problem. At the Amsterdam Arena, going from a concert to a football match — relaying the turf, the maintenance, all of it — takes about two days.

As for what this match's organizer actually did: "It has been raining for days and there was no time for a major overhaul. Fifty or sixty staff tended the turf every day, watching it from the moment the rain started last week. The problem isn't standing water and it isn't the grass — it's that days of continuous rain made the sand under the turf settle, leaving hollows beneath the grass."

Oddly enough, a few kilometers from the Bird's Nest at the Workers' Stadium, that day's Chinese FA Cup match went ahead untouched. Are Chinese Super League players really less fussy?

Put a few numbers side by side and the farce looks more absurd still. Two of the five best-paid footballers in the world currently play in the Chinese Super League, on higher wages than Manchester United's Zlatan Ibrahimović or Barcelona's Neymar. And yet the Bird's Nest, the national stadium in China's own capital, turned out to be exactly where people got stood up.

After the cancellation, players and executives from both Manchester United and Manchester City apologized online. Manchester United released an apology video in which Michael Carrick, Luke Shaw and Juan Mata thanked Chinese fans for their support.

The organizer, by contrast, kept repeating "severe weather conditions" in its statements and said nothing about its own failure to maintain the pitch.

A user called Zhao Xiongmao wrote on Manchester United Football Club's official Weibo account: "It isn't even the team's fault and the team is already out there doing damage control. Doesn't LeTV feel ashamed?"

Around 9 pm on the night of the cancellation, LeTV Sports texted fans its refund plan: tickets would be swapped for a shopping card worth 800 yuan, usable only in Beijing.

That set fans off again. A user called Erwa Is a Little Cutie asked: "And it takes 10 business days to mail it to the address on the ticket order? So out-of-town fans go home, wait for the shopping card, come back to Beijing, spend 800 yuan and haul the stuff home?!"

This morning LeTV updated the refund plan again and published every refund channel.

Fans weren't the only ones hurt; the sponsors' interests probably were too. The insurance giant Aon, Chevrolet, Adidas and the luxury watchmaker TAG Heuer were this year's first-tier sponsors of the ICC's China leg, with Adidas in its second year.

The International Champions Cup began as a preseason tournament sponsored by the American company Relevant Sports, which invited top clubs from Europe's five big leagues to play in the United States, giving the invited teams a chance to work in new signings. It came to Asia for the first time in 2015, staged across North America, Australia and China and broadcast in 165 countries and regions, with more than 80 million viewers in Asia-Pacific. Last year's China leg — Inter Milan, AC Milan and Real Madrid — drew 116,000 spectators in total.

This March, LeTV Sports again worked with Relevant Sports and Jiadalifeng to bring three clubs to China. LeTV Sports also said it would handle the whole tournament: operations, broadcast production, content distribution and commercial monetization. By LeTV Sports' account at the time, the event had already broken even in China the previous year. Commercially, the first China leg of the International Champions Cup drew backing from global brands including Samsung, Adidas and EA, and with box office included, revenue reached 100 million yuan — enough to break even.

Now all of it has turned into a farce. According to people familiar with the matter, five companies — Jidao Zhihe, Haizewei, Huashi Jiahe, Guoan DDB and Baozehengtong — have decided to send LeTV Sports a lawyer's letter demanding 5.872 million yuan in unpaid balances plus 1 million yuan in damages for each company. They also said Manchester United, Manchester City and LeTV's co-organizer Relevant Sports had formally filed notices declaring LeTV Sports in breach of contract. LeTV denied the report, saying it had no partnership with those five companies and suggesting a competitor may have made the story up.

Because the Manchester United–Manchester City match was canceled, this year's China leg of the International Champions Cup will not name a champion. Under the original rules, the team with the most points after three matches would have taken the title.

One Dortmund fan joked when he heard: "Oh, where's our trophy? If it weren't for the '100-year LeTV membership' as the champion's prize, who would show up for this?"

After the first match, between Manchester United and Dortmund, the organizer handed the man of the match not a commemorative trophy but an oversized piece of card stock reading "LeTV Super Sports Membership."

A top comment on Weibo: "So a Spaniard playing in the Bundesliga is supposed to watch the Chinese Super League on LeTV Sports now?" LeTV had already annoyed plenty of people by bundling Li Yuchun concert tickets with LeTV Sports memberships.

On July 28 the Manchester City–Dortmund match in Shenzhen will go ahead as planned. One sincere suggestion: stop handing people 10-year membership cards.

Update: At 7:33 pm on July 26, LeTV Sports posted a notice on its official Weibo account about reimbursing travel costs for out-of-town fans. Please take note.

At 8:49 pm on July 26, Manchester City announced on its official Sina Weibo account that it was starting emergency support measures: everyone holding a ticket to the Beijing leg of the International Champions Cup would get a free Cityzens membership for the new season, and anyone willing to travel to Shenzhen would get a free ticket to the second match, against Borussia Dortmund.

Hats off to the club!