This country is winning the World Cup without a team
Chinese companies have dominated the tournament.
Shaoyu Yuan is a professor at New York University and the author of “Reframing China: TikTok, Soft Power, and the Battle for Global Narratives.”
On a hot Thursday in late June, my father and I rode the train to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey to watch Germany play Ecuador in the World Cup. My father had flown from China for the tournament, a trip planned years in advance around a national team that ultimately failed to qualify. The Chinese men’s team has missed every World Cup since 2002. That was the year my father and I watched matches on a boxy television in our living room, back when Chinese fans still believed a golden era of soccer was beginning.
Ecuador won, 2-1, and 80,000 people roared through a German collapse. But the more interesting spectacle was off the field. At halftime, my father gestured to the Chinese logos on the stadium’s displays. He observed that China had not qualified, yet somehow was everywhere.
When a referee jogged to the sideline to review a call, the replay ran on screens supplied by Hisense, a Chinese appliance maker. Lenovo, a Chinese company and the official technology partner of FIFA, and its subsidiary Motorola provided teams and stadium staff with more than 17,000 tablets, computers and other devices. All 48 teams use Lenovo’s soccer data analytics platform. At the opening ceremony in Mexico City, the special guest dancing on the sideline was a human-size Labubu, the snaggletoothed toy from Chinese retailer Pop Mart.
Americans look for Chinese influence in the wrong places. Elected officials assume it is covert and directed: a propaganda bureau or an app poisoning teenage minds. That assumption drove Congress to force the Chinese divestiture of TikTok’s U.S. operations. Federal programs have stripped Chinese equipment from rural telephone networks and blacklisted Chinese chipmakers by the dozen. Yet this summer, at an event with as many as 10 million visitors to the United States, before an audience of hundreds of millions, Chinese technology runs the referees’ screens and Chinese devices crunch the match data. No law is being broken. Hardly anyone has noticed.
The soft power on display at the World Cup works because it increases global familiarity with Chinese brands, slowly making their ubiquity unremarkable. Japan ran this play a generation ago. From 1982 to 2014, the logos of Japanese electronics firms lined World Cup stadium pitches. Global concerns about rising Japanese economic power in the late 20th century seemed to dissipate as Sony and Panasonic became household names.
China’s version of this strategy is harder to counter. Chinese brands hold fewer top FIFA sponsorships than in 2018, but the remaining sponsors are firmly entrenched in the tournament’s infrastructure. When Chinese devices help officials decide whether a goal stands, the subliminal message reaching viewers is that the world now runs on Chinese technology.
That influence isn’t the kind Beijing originally wanted. In 2011, two years before he became president of China, Xi Jinping declared three wishes for Chinese soccer. The third was to win a World Cup title. The government has spent billions of dollars trying to develop a competent national team through six failed qualification cycles. A one-party state that built a high-speed rail system has not produced 11 men who pass well under pressure. But Chinese brands may do more to soften Americans’ view of China than a strong tournament run ever could.
The effect is most obvious on the young. A Pew Research Center survey from 2025 found a generational split: People under 30 years old, raised on Shein orders and TikTok feeds, hold warmer views of China than their parents do. Their picture of the country is a collage of quality products and cute characters. That positive image grows when high-performing Chinese technology powers a World Cup on American soil.
On July 19, the final comes to MetLife Stadium in front of what might be the largest television audience in the history of sports. My father and I will watch it together, the way we did in 2002, on a screen built by a Chinese company.
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