Hao Haidong

Bayi Football Team

Hao Haidong would make a name for himself by rising through the ranks with Bayi Football Team. On 31 July 1994, Hao was involved in an on-the-pitch brawl with Craig Allardyce, son of former English manager Sam Allardyce, in Bayi's league match with Guangdong Winnerway. This resulted in Hao and Allardyce receiving a half-year ban by the Chinese Football Association and thus Hao was not allowed to play for the Chinese national team in the 1994 Asian Games. While his personal performances with Bayi remained impressive, the team were not genuine title contenders anymore due to the club's struggles with professionalism and a requirement that all their players remain active People's Liberation Army members. With a significantly improved salary and a chance to win more silverware he would transfer to reigning league champions Dalian Shide at the beginning of the 1997 league season for a club record fee of 2,200,000 yuan at the time.

Dalian Shide

His move to Dalian Shide would be a huge success and he would win the league title and Chinese FA Super Cup as well as also personally winning the Golden Boot and Golden Ball award in the 1997 season. The following season, Hao would continue to add to his medal collection with another league title and more personal awards while barely losing the Asian Club Championship as well. While Hao would be applauded for his football achievements and was even starting to be known as the "Chinese Alan Shearer", he…

Hao enjoyed a stellar international career by playing at the 2002 FIFA World Cup and is the record top goalscorer with 41 goals for the Chinese national team. Although China never made progress into Asia's final qualifying round 2006 (finished behind Kuwait), Hao led his country in a bid to reach Germany. Hao is considered to be the best striker from China in the past two decades. Hao is the all-time leading goalscorer for Chinese national team de facto, with 40 goals. After political controversies occurred in 2020, Hao's data was removed from Chinese websites. The Chinese Football Association recognized Wu Lei is the all-time leading goalscorer for Chinese national team de jure, with 36 goals.

With his ex-wife Chen Yi, Hao has a son, Runze Hao (郝润泽), who is also a professional football player, and a daughter named Hao Runhan (郝润涵). Hao married former badminton champion Ye Zhaoying in summer 2019. As of 2022, Hao and Ye reside in Málaga, Spain.

On 4 June 2020, on the 31st anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Hao Haidong and his wife Ye Zhaoying publicly denounced the Chinese Communist Party, including for its mishandling of professional sports, Tibet, Hong Kong, and the COVID-19 pandemic. "Football in China is a reflection of the country ... it's not the players that make it worse, it's the bureaucrats that damage the whole business by ignoring the rules", they said. They advocated the formation of a "New Federal State of China", a proposal supported by Chinese dissident Miles Kwok and American political strategist Steve Bannon. In response, the Chinese Communist Party first issued statements harshly criticizing Hao and Ye, and then altered course to expunge all references to them from the Chinese-accessible internet—the Weibo accounts of Hao and Ye were deleted, and their online profiles on major portals in China – Sina Sports and Tencent Sport – were expunged. Six days later, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Hao and Ye reiterated their criticism of one-party rule in China and restated their willingness to advocate for human rights despite potential political and personal costs: "There are many people who think the same way as we do but they don't dare to speak up inside the country – and they are becoming less and less willing to speak." It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for a successful Chinese sports star to unleash such a blistering public denunciation of the Communist…