Many Chinese would say that is an insult to Brazilian table tennis players.

“It’s so beyond an embarrassment that it almost seems like a comedy,” a popular soccer columnist, Li Chengpeng, said in an interview before the match. “We’ve cried our tears dry, and now it’s time for us to enjoy the big show, because you never know how our team is going to lose this time.”

Soccer presents the biggest conundrum for the Chinese sports machine  the country has the money, the population and the fan base to put together a world-class team, yet has not succeeded. The men’s national team has been to the World Cup only once, when Japan and South Korea were the hosts in 2002, but it failed to score a goal in three games. In 2004, Chinese fans nearly rioted in Beijing when China lost the Asian Cup final to Japan, 3-1. The latest embarrassment came in June, when the team lost to Iraq in a World Cup qualifying match, 2-1. China was later eliminated from qualifying for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Chinese leaders generally try to silence widespread criticism of national symbols, but with men’s soccer, the government allows people to vent.

Everyone piles on, including state news media like CCTV and Xinhua, celebrity sports bloggers, even other athletes and coaches. Fans also openly deride the head of the government-run Chinese Football Association, Xie Yalong, a former senior official from Shaanxi Province. “Xie Yalong must resign!” became a loud chant at the last two Olympic matches, and Xie was seen leaving the Belgium match early.

Many Chinese sports analysts and scholars point to endemic corruption within the association as one cause of the sport’s ills. The association started the current league system in 1994, and soccer became the first sport to achieve commercial success in China, with sponsors pouring in millions of dollars.

Xu Guoqi, a professor of East Asian history at Kalamazoo College and the author of a new book on China and the Olympics, said Chinese soccer would improve only after the rule of law is established in China. He said disappointment with soccer could lead to the next “major revolution” in China. And he was not joking.

“Without rule of law, corruption will get involved, and nobody is responsible to anyone,” said Xu, who wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post last month lamenting the state of Chinese soccer. “If Chinese continue to be obsessed with soccer, they’ll definitely demand something dramatic, something political or involving rule of law. It will start with sports, and then it will move onto something bigger.”