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Naturalization has been a buzzword in China's sport with several foreign footballers becoming Chinese national since 2019, which is an unprecedented phenomenon. The reason for naturalization is straightforward: enter the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which is also an important step to fulfill the Chinese football dream and become a sports power. Although the national men’s team failed again, naturalized players have challenged the conventional idea of Chinese nationality and citizenship. Additionally, most of them have no genuine connection to China and they can hardly speak Chinese even though some of them have Chinese linage, which makes people feel it is a trade of nationality motivated by money. Therefore, their special identities and sports performance have become the focus of Chinese people’s attention and have been hotly debated on social media. Several nationalism theories in terms of ethnosymbolism, invented tradition and imagined community will be adopted to explore Chinese people’s perceptions of nationality and national identity through naturalization in China. This article employs thematic analysis to examine 22 semi-structured interviews and social media extracts from Sino-Weibo users’ comments and posts about football naturalization in China. In their discussion, we can understand how Chinese people’s attitudes are divided about this issue and their recognition of what it means to be Chinese. In a sense, football and nationalism are both a matter of inclusion and exclusion to these naturalized athletes in terms of constructing their controversial identities as new members of the Chinese nation whether in an ethnic, cultural, or civic way.
