In hindsight, there were subtle clues about the sustainability of it all. In March 2017, Carlos Tevez made his debut for Shanghai Shenhua at the age of 34. Two months earlier they had paid the sixth-highest transfer fee in history to sign him and agreed to give him £615,000 a week for the privilege. Tevez scored four goals, went back to Boca Juniors and immediately joked that he had treated his seven months in China as a holiday.
For three years, Chinese Super League clubs spent money as if Brewster’s Millions had been an instructional video. In 2016, the Financial Times estimated that they had paid more in transfer fees than any other league in the world. Any footballer after a new start and a higher tax bracket was a candidate. By 2017, six of the ten highest-paid players in the game called the CSL home.
This was part of national strategy. In 2011, President Xi Jinping listed three wishes for China and all were football-related: qualify for the World Cup, host the World Cup, win the World Cup. The first step was a successful domestic league and, increasingly success is measured by star players. Conglomerates were invited to invest in clubs that effectively became their marketing arms.
Now the fever dream is over. Last week, champions Jiangsu Suning officially folded after its parent company pulled the plug on all investment in football activity. Jiangsu had debts of £67m and were up for sale at a nominal price of one cent; there were no takers. And they are not alone: 16 clubs in China’s top three divisions have collapsed in the last 12 months. More are expected to follow.
The difficulties of the last year could not have been predicted. Covid-19 has decimated the revenues of Chinese retail and clubs have lost all matchday revenue. Parent companies have been forced to cut back. Football was only a viable side-interest when disposable income was freely available.
But this is also the results of a shift in governmental policy. Disturbed by the focus on high-profile signings and the lack of investment in grassroots and deliberate ignorance of domestic players, clubs have had spending limits on international players imposed. Brands that were originally invited to plaster clubs with their logos have been banned from including company names as part of club names. The drive to spend vast swathes of revenue on a football team has evaporated.
It is tempting to label those footballers who travelled to China – and are now caught in football purgatory – as mercenaries receiving their just desserts. There is certainly an irony to them being courted for exorbitant fees and now seeking their exit in a hasty firesale.
But then those players never endured the burden of inherent loyalty in the first place. The typical CSL glamour signing was a South American from a high-profile European club. Their departure from their culture came with the moves to Europe, not Asia. Many had grown up in hardship and poverty. They simply went where they were wanted and maximised their income in the process, the willing participants in a simple – if particularly lavish – system of supply and demand.
China has not given up on football, quite the opposite. The governmental message (which you can be as cynical about as you wish – I’m midway on the scale) is that an epiphany has taken place. Only by focusing on grassroots football and improving domestic players can sustainable improvement be provoked, and the vast training centres built by major clubs and their owners will assist in that work. They present the latest crisis not as the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. But there are serious questions about where domestic football goes from here.
There will be those who delight in the Chinese Super League’s failure and delight too in being proved right. To them, this is an Icarus-style morality tale on the dangers of trying to shortcut your way to the top. Come back to us when you’ve got 150 years of ingrained football culture, China. Let us know when Lowry has painted fans Going To The Match in Qingdao. There’s a strand of truth to that argument, of course. This was a deliberate power grab for a large slice of culture – and therefore economy – that is very difficult to fake.
But then any delight passes comment on our own insularity and protectionism. If there is indeed a crassness to conglomerates owning football clubs, using them as marketing arms of their parent companies and signing players for vast money in a bid to chase a rapid ascent to the top, I’ve got bad news for disciples of the Premier League.
It is true that England has a deeper, richer domestic football culture than China. But does that ban them from the shortcut approach? If we were starting from scratch now, we probably would attempt to fast forward through decades of pure amateurism, a century of imposed maximum wages and banning foreign players for a quarter of a century. In fact, when the rampant commercialisation of English football made it the natural home for vast foreign investment, we did much the same.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3sTFjb4
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