Lottery will draw more attention to Chinese football leagues

‍‍The newest document about Chinese football reform set a goal of developing sports lottery which would guess on the results of Chinese football leagues. This lottery has been looked forward by many people in the past decade. Advocates say that this will help draw more attention to Chinese football and promote growth of the leagues. 

China has sports lottery that use match results of overseas leagues, like the Premier League, La Liga, and leagues in Asia, America and Africa. In 2015, leagues of Russia and Chili will also be introduced into the lottery. There will be 13,000 lottery rounds in 2015. But games of Chinese football leagues are not included in the lottery. 

“If Chinese football leagues are put into sports lottery, there will be 10 times more attention paid to the leagues than now, and I estimate the annual sales of the lottery will be over hundreds of billions yuan.” Said Liu Xiaowu, the chairman of Guangdong Futsal Association. 

Mr Liu has been football manager for more than 10 years. He has been calling for Chinese football lottery. He suggested it many times on Conference of General Managers of Chinese Football Association, and people even dubbed him “Liu Lottery”. Under the efforts of football managers including him, Chinese began to have sports lottery in 2000. 

Liu thinks that the absence of a sports lottery is the main cause of the decline of the football market and in the number of audiences. “Sponsorships, advertisements, and ticket sales will all increase, and the revenue of clubs will be ten times more, or even dozens of time more.”

With these being said, the launch of a Chinese football league lottery will still face problems. Because the lottery has a nature of betting in it, it will require strict management and control.