Women's World Cup: Steel Roses outkick men in Chinese football

Xue Jiao, pictured on the left here, played for the Chinese women's national football team as a defender for years.

As a defender for China's women's national football team, Xue Jiao recalls how her squad did the impossible in 2015 when they ended the US team's 11-year unbeaten streak at home in Los Angeles.

Xue says the display of willpower showed the world why Chinese fans call them the Steel Roses. And she hopes the team will live up to that name during the Women's World Cup taking place in Australia and New Zealand.

"Everyone thought we would lose when the Americans invited us to join the match. But football is round, you never know what will happen until the very last second," the 30-year-old Xue, now retired, tells the BBC.

"To beat one of the best teams in the world, in their home country, and break such a winning record… that victory put us over the moon," says Xue, who will watch the World Cup from her home in the north-eastern city of Dalian.

China has work to do to get to the next round. After losing their first game to Denmark, they have to beat Haiti in Adelaide on Friday to remain hopeful for the next round when they face England next Tuesday.

Outside the World Cup however, the Steel Roses are outperforming their male counterparts in China, a remarkable feat in a country that has long associated the sport with men.

No matter the results at the World Cup, the team will be welcomed as heroes.

"The girls have demonstrated the great demeanour of Chinese women's football, showed their desire for victory, and that was the most valuable quality passed on by generations of Chinese women's football," said Huang Jianxiang, one of the most famous football commentators in the country, after the first game.

"They looked much better than our men's team," read one comment from China's social media platform Weibo.

Team spirit

For years, the women's football team has been a source of pride while the men's team is seen as a constant disappointment.

The women's team is currently ranked 14th in the world while the men are in 80th place.

Sun Wen, who wore No. 9 for China, is an iconic figure of its women's team's "golden era" in the 90s.

China's men's team peaked in the early 2000s, when they qualified for the World Cup finals for the first - and only - time in 2002, and then came second in the Asian Cup in 2004.

The women's team, on the other hand, has a longer history of winning at international tournaments. They dominated the sport in the 90s and hosted the first Women's World Cup in 1991.

The women's team also entered its prime during that decade. Captained by Sun Wen, widely considered one of the greatest female footballers of all time, the team was invincible in Asia, and won silver medals at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the 1999 World Cup.

At home, the team is beloved as the Steel Roses, which is also the title of their theme song that millions of Chinese know by heart.

Xue says the keys to their success are intensive training and the close bond built among them during the sessions - a tradition passed from older generations.

Their training hours are longer than most other teams, she says. Each session usually takes two to two-and-half hours, and they train up to three times a day, from morning to evening.

"Even if the ball goes out, we will still chase it till the last second. That spirit has always been within the team," she says.

The real national football team

While the team's current play is not at the same level as it was in the 90s, which was their heyday, they are stronger than the men's team.

So much so that many in China have been calling the women's squad the country's real guozu, or national team - not the men.

Football is one of the most popular sports in China.

But the patriarchal nature of Chinese society still firmly puts it on the side of the men's team.

When the Chinese Football Association unveiled plans in 2016 to make China a football superpower, a vision set out by President Xi Jinping, most of the resources and strategies focused on the men's team.

"The national football development plans were essentially framed in male terms," says Simon Chadwick, professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy at Skema Business School in Paris.

Xue concedes that football in China is "quite patriarchal".

"The financial disparity is huge, and the attention we get is not on the same level. When it comes to men's games, the seats would be filled up a lot of times, but when we compete, the spectators are usually just our families and friends."

As in many countries, it's also the men who rake in the money. According to the government-backed Shanghai Observer, the average income of clubs in the women's professional football league is 60 to 90 times less than that of the men's league.

Will reforms work?

But the gender divide has worked to the women's advantage. They have been spared the noise, rumours and controversies that typically hound the men's team - this has become obvious during this World Cup season.

Since November, at least 13 senior officials were investigated or punished as part of a crackdown on corruption and match-fixing in football. The crackdown targeted the men's league and national teams - one of the officials is a legendary player and former head coach of the men's national team Li Tie.

Big money on the men's side of the sport likely brings with it more temptation to cheat, according to Mark Dreyer, author of Sporting Superpower, a book about China's sporting ambitions.

The women's team also faces less intervention from Communist Party officials when it comes to management and governance, giving them wider breathing room for development, argues Prof Chadwick.

"There are regular, unpredictable, and sometimes damaging state interventions into football," he says. "And the Chinese government and Chinese football authorities went after men. They didn't go after women."

However, when the Chinese Football Association issued a reform plan for women's football last year, many saw it as a signal of more state involvement that could throw the team off course.

The bottom-to-top approach that has helped football grow in China contradicts the top-down set-up of Chinese society, Mr Dreyer says.

"All this [the orders] comes from the government and filters down through people who absolutely have no idea about football… China can't make it work because it can't resolve this contradiction between bottom-up and top-down."