At the height of the madness, you could not help wondering where it was all going to end.
In the space of 10 days in early January 2016, the Chinese Super League (CSL) transfer record was broken three times. First, Jiangsu Suning paid Chelsea £24 million to sign Ramires. Then Guangzhou Evergrande paid Atletico Madrid £25 million for Jackson Martinez. Unwilling to be outdone, Jiangsu Suning went even higher, gazumping Liverpool to lure Brazilian winger Alex Teixeira from Shakhtar Donetsk in a deal worth £38.5 million.
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And that was just the transfer fees. The wages were on another level. Ramires saw his salary double to more than £10 million a year. Likewise Teixeira, who was not even a full international.
“(Chinese clubs) seem to have the financial power to lure every player from Europe,” warned Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger. “There is a very strong political desire in China to become a big player and we (the Premier League) have to be worried.”
On and on it went. In that year’s summer window, Hebei China Fortune bought Ezequiel Lavezzi from Paris Saint-Germain, before Shandong Luneng signed Papiss Cisse from Newcastle United and Graziano Pelle from Southampton. Shanghai SIPG broke the transfer record to sign Brazilian forward Hulk from Zenit Saint Petersburg for £45 million, giving him a £320,000-a-week contract.
In the final weeks of 2016, Chelsea were raided again, this time for Brazil playmaker Oscar, who joined Shanghai SIPG in a record-breaking deal worth more than £52 million. His contract was worth around £400,000 a week, which was Lionel Messi/Cristiano Ronaldo territory, possibly beyond. And then, in a classic case of trying to outdo the neighbours, Shanghai Greenland Shenhua offered to make Carlos Tevez by far the highest-paid player in world football on a deal worth more than £600,000 a week.
Jorge Mendes, Ronaldo’s agent, claimed his client had received an offer from China worth more than €100 million a year, or more than £1.6 million a week. Frankly, by that stage, it had begun to feel as if signing Ronaldo or Messi — or both — was the logical next development in the CSL arms race.
All of this had been encouraged by President Xi Jinping, who had declared an ambition to turn China into a “football powerhouse”. Huge corporations such as Suning (retail) and Evergrande (real estate) had been urged to bankroll the CSL. In return, they would gain greater global exposure for their brands and, significantly, presidential approval.
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But things were about to change. Government ministers began to worry that paying a 32-year-old Tevez more than £30 million a year may not be the best start to China’s long march to powerhouse status. Wasn’t this meant to be about the growth of domestic football rather than a get-rich-quick scheme for ageing players (mostly South American) and a handful of influential agents?
This would not do. The Chinese FA was told to look for ways to limit the number of overseas players at each club, ensuring opportunities for homegrown players, and to put a cap on spending. And to do so immediately.
It became a race against time. The Tevez deal was rushed through and, with the clock ticking, another club plotted what would have been arguably the CSL’s greatest coup.
Diego Costa was at the peak of his powers, having scored 14 goals in 18 Premier League appearances to take Chelsea six points clear at the top of the table by the end of 2016. When the transfer window opened in January 2017, Chelsea learned, to their horror, that he was planning to move to China, having been offered a Tevez-type deal by Tianjin Quanjian.
It was one thing to lose Ramires and Oscar, neither of them a regular starter at the time, but to lose Costa, halfway through the title race, would have been an enormous blow to Chelsea and indeed the Premier League.
Chelsea coach Antonio Conte warned that the Chinese market was “a danger for all — not only for Chelsea but for all the teams in the world”.
Teixeira, who had not looked back since joining Jiangsu Suning, shrugged and said CSL clubs were only doing to the Premier League what the Premier League had done to other leagues.
But, even in China, it had begun to feel unsustainable. Just as Tianjin Quanjian were intensifying their efforts to sign Costa, the Chinese FA announced a series of measures to address “irrational investments by clubs, high-figure transfer fees and salaries paid to domestic and international athletes and other issues”.
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Almost overnight, the number of overseas players allowed on the pitch at any one time was reduced from four to three — a serious shock to Shanghai SIPG, who, as well as Oscar and Hulk, had signed Brazilian midfielder Elkeson and former Porto, Chelsea and Real Madrid defender Ricardo Carvalho. They were not the only club in this boat and the start of the season was six weeks away.
The new financial regulations were not set in stone but it was made clear that some degree of restraint was expected. Tianjin Quanjian did not give up on Costa but they were no longer able to make the kind of offer Chelsea couldn’t refuse.
An era of austerity? Hardly. Not when players like Yannick Carrasco, Javier Mascherano, Marek Hamsik, Mousa Dembele and Marouane Fellaini and coaches like Rafa Benitez continued to arrive on huge contracts. But the speed with which the government moved the goalposts in January 2017 offered a warning of how quickly things could change.
Spool forward to the present day. Jiangsu Suning, last season’s CSL champions, no longer exist; in February, just three months after their success, with a team still containing Texeira and the former Italy striker Eder, the club was dissolved due to the financial troubles that engulfed the Suning retail group.
The Evergrande Group is in crisis, raising serious doubts not just about the construction of a new £1.4 billion, 100,000-capacity stadium in Guangzhou, but about the future of the league’s most successful club. Reports on Friday suggested the government has taken over the stadium project and that Evergrande is trying to sell Guangzhou FC (which no longer bears the company’s name). In a sign of the times, former Tottenham, Barcelona and Brazil midfielder Paulinho, the club’s poster boy, left last summer for Saudi Arabian club Al-Ahli.
The first stage of the 2021 CSL season ran from April to August, with matches played in COVID-secure “bubbles” in Guangzhou and Suzhou, but the championship stage was put on hold so the national team could focus on World Cup qualification — a goal they appear unlikely to meet.
The CSL campaign is due to resume soon, with reports suggesting a start of December 12, but details of the restart remain troublingly scarce. In the meantime, the talk is of unpaid wages at several clubs and deepening turmoil at others. One report in China last week stated 11 of the 16 clubs are in arrears with their wages. In the second tier, China League One, the situation is said to be even worse.
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Hebei FC have admitted to severe financial difficulties, raising concerns they might not be able to compete in the championship stage when (or if) the season resumes. Players at Chongqing Liangjiang Athletic recently issued a statement saying the team had “lost ability to operate normally” due to financial problems.
These issues go far beyond football. The Chinese economy is facing much more serious challenges, with years of rapid growth followed by a slowdown which has been compounded by COVID-19. First came the crisis at Suning, then Evergrande and now there are fears for China Fortune Land Development and other major corporations with clubs in their portfolios.
It comes back to something Zhang Jindong, Suning’s owner, said last February with the company on the brink. In a video address to Suning’s huge workforce, he said he would “focus on retail business resolutely” and would “without hesitation” abandon those interests “irrelevant to retail business”. Inter Milan, who were owned by Suning, have felt the consequences of that. As for CSL champions Jiangsu Suning, they, as well as their successful women’s team, ceased operations days later.
That is the reality facing the CSL: it was built on investment from big corporations and billionaires, who danced to the president’s tune. And it was always a question of what would happen once that tune changed or the music stopped altogether.
President Xi has long been known as a football fan. When, as vice-president, he was invited to share his personal wishes for China, the three he stated were all about football: qualify for a World Cup, host a World Cup and, ultimately, win a World Cup.
In 2014, a year into his presidency, Xi oversaw the publication of an extensive strategy to turn China into that football powerhouse. As well as wanting the big corporations to use their wealth to transform the CSL into one of the global football’s leading competitions, he encouraged investment in European clubs, particularly England.
A year later he ended a state visit to the UK with a trip to Manchester City’s training ground, where he posed for a selfie with Sergio Aguero and then-prime minister David Cameron. A few weeks after that, a consortium called China Media Capital announced a £265 million investment in a 13 per cent stake in Manchester City. Nobody could accuse President Xi of underestimating football as a means of winning friends and influencing people.
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There was also a more fundamental, long-term commitment to build a football nation from the grassroots upwards. That strategy included a plan to install 70,000 new pitches and 20,000 training centres across China by 2020. The sport became compulsory in schools for children aged six and above.
“This wasn’t just about trying to win the World Cup at some point in the future,” says Tom Byer, an American coach who became the head technical consultant on football to the Chinese ministry of education. “The bigger picture was about trying to create a thriving football culture and enjoying the long-term health benefits that would come with that.”
Some feel there were ulterior motives.
“Initially, these moves were about Xi’s profile and popularity,” says Simon Chadwick, global professor of the Eurasian Sport Industry at the Emlyon Business School. “There are lots of football fans in China, so this demonstrates to the population that you’re thinking in the same way as them.
“It also creates a connection with the people who will be charged with implementing your policies. And there’s a feelgood factor to it. Through football, Xi was able to show he really cared about national image and prestige.”
China felt like a country that had everything but a world-beating — or even a vaguely competitive — football team.
“There had been the great success at the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese economy had become the second in the world and they were shooting rockets into space… but they would struggle to beat Hong Kong in a World Cup qualifier,” Byer says. “Investing in football and trying to build a football culture was an important thing to do. But that takes decades.”
The CSL represented an opportunity to stimulate interest more immediately if fans — especially young fans — could be drawn to the exploits of Oscar, Tevez and Lavezzi, rather than whatever was happening in the Premier League, La Liga or the NBA.
It was easier said than done, though.
Chinese football history had seen so many clubs come and go without ever embedding themselves in the national consciousness. And most Chinese fans had a far greater attachment to the big European clubs. In such an enormous country, the CSL can feel as remote as those leagues played on the other side of the world. For the product to be compelling, it has to be good.
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One agent who has dealt extensively with Chinese clubs says the standard of the CSL has been far better than is widely portrayed, citing Guangzhou Evergrande’s Asian Champions League successes in 2013 and 2015. His frustration is that the improvement was not sustained in line with expenditure post-2016.
“Bringing in elite-level players on huge salaries hasn’t worked,” the agent says. “In a team game, when there’s a huge gap in technical quality between the overseas players and the domestic players, that’s a problem. When the overseas players are being paid so much and they don’t share the same motivation, that’s a problem, too.
“If you look at the growth of the Premier League since the 1990s, the influx of foreign players drove up the standard because both they and the domestic players had the same objective. There was no sense of ‘them and us’ — not really, anyway. Has the presence of so many foreign players, on massive money, been good for Chinese football? Debatable.”
Some players, such as Paulinho, Oscar and Teixeira, embraced the challenge, or at least accepted it for what it was. Others treated it with barely disguised contempt.
Tevez made just 16 CSL appearances, scoring four goals, and that £600,000-a-week deal did not buy his diplomacy. He was scathing about the technical level in China, saying “even in 50 years they won’t be able to compete”. After returning to Boca Juniors, he said he felt like he had been on holiday for seven months. “I don’t know what I was doing there,” the former Argentina forward said.
For three consecutive seasons, the average attendance in the CSL rose: from 18,571 in 2013 to 24,159 three years later. From 2016 onwards it held around the 24,000 mark, which made its average attendance the sixth highest in world football, not far behind La Liga and Serie A. But the growth that might have been anticipated after 2016 did not materialise.
And then the pandemic hit. Hard. Quite apart from the wider impact on the economy and the football industry, it left players and coaches locked down in hotels for months in COVID-secure bubbles.
In January, Benitez walked out on a highly lucrative contract as coach of Dalian Professional, saying he would not return because, “COVID-19 has changed our lives and our projects”. Players who had leapt at the opportunity to move to China found themselves pleading with their agents to find a way out. Stephan El Shaarawy and Marko Arnautovic headed to Italy, Hulk to Brazil, Hamsik to Sweden and Paulinho to Saudi Arabia. The talent drain was now going in reverse.
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In March, the Chinese FA announced the introduction of a CSL salary cap, whereby overseas players would be allowed to earn no more than €3 million a year, which works out at just under £50,000 a week. An agent suggests no more than a handful of CSL players will be close to that figure. “Almost all the big names have gone,” he says. “The type of players who would have earned mega money with a swan song in China past are now more likely to go to the Middle East.”
Some would call this a blessing in disguise. But it will be hard to put on a brave face if the crowds don’t return. The uncertainty over the league, along with the persistent gloom surrounding the national team, has raised concerns among Chinese football fans.
The bigger picture is that the CSL is suffering because private capital is and the football industry has ceased to enjoy privileged status.
That may be an obvious consequence of the pandemic and straitened economic circumstances, but the relationship between the CSL and big business had been heading that way. The Chinese FA’s insistence on more “neutral” club names this season (with Guangzhou Evergrande becoming Guangzhou FC, Hebei China Fortune becoming Hebei FC and so on) has done little for the corporations’ desire to help football out of its cashflow crisis.
So, is it just a market correction?
Chinese sports reporter Bi Yuan explains it is not as simple as western economic principles might suggest. “The real estate industry, as the engine of the league, was booming for the past decade, due to state policy,” he says. “And now, similarly, that bubble is bursting.”
One Chinese sportswriter, who prefers not to be named, likens the CSL to “a ghost ship, drifting with no passengers alive”.
It is summed up, he says, by the collapse of Jiangsu Suning — “What kind of league doesn’t have a champion to defend its title?” — but also by the bulletins of turmoil at other clubs and the sense of a competition being left to mothball since August. “And for what?” he asks.
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The idea was that by postponing the final stage of the season until December, China could focus on qualifying for a first World Cup since 2002. But it hasn’t worked. Under the management of former Everton and Sheffield United midfielder Li Tie, they sailed through the second qualifying round, but in the final round they have lost three of their six matches, the only victory coming against Vietnam after a 95th-minute goal from Espanyol’s Wu Lei.
It is tough, though. China have not been helped by the ongoing COVID-19 restrictions, which have required them to play all their matches at neutral venues in the Middle East. And the reality is Asian football is dominated by Japan, South Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Australia (who joined the Asian Football Confederation in 2006). Up to five Asian teams can qualify for next year’s World Cup in addition to Qatar, the hosts. China might be seen as an underachiever on the world stage, but arguably it would take a certain level of overperformance to reach the World Cup at the expense of one of Asian football’s heavyweights.
China are 74th in the FIFA rankings, just below Montenegro and Cape Verde Islands. They climbed as high as 57th in 2017, but generally they lie somewhere in the 70s or 80s. They are the eighth-ranked Asian team, behind the usual suspects plus Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Bridging that gap remains a tall order.
“That would be fair enough if you could say it takes years to turn things around,” says Jonathan Sullivan, a political scientist who specialises in Chinese studies at the University of Nottingham. “But not when China made a deal with the devil and did what it decried for decades in the most scathing terms: hiring a handful of Brazilians to help them win immediately.
“Naturalisation is a big deal in China — citizenship isn’t given away like it is in some countries — and it took two decades of institutional wrangling to agree to field ‘naturalised’ players with no Chinese ancestry. It was extremely controversial.”
The expansion to a 48-team World Cup in 2026, though, is a huge boost for China. Indeed, many wonder whether FIFA’s plan is partly about making it easier for the world’s most populous country — and potentially its biggest market — to have a significant stake in the tournament. The question is whether China, assuming they qualify, can develop a team that will do the president’s ambitions justice.
Sullivan suggests it would be premature to write off President Xi’s football project as a failure.
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“There were tangible milestones set across three different timeframes, including long-term ones all the way to 2050,” he says. “We are only a few years in and some of the investments will take years to yield dividends. If you invest in youth-training systems now, it could take a generation before results manifest. That’s the same everywhere, not just China.
“That said, football as a state-led, political-economic project has lost its lustre. The optimism of private capital, local governments and fans from 2014 to 2016 is significantly diminished. China’s domestic and international contexts are very different and more difficult than seven years ago. Football was always a side project and now there are many other very serious issues that have further marginalised it.”
Beyond the success, or otherwise, of the national team and the league, the question is whether that longed-for football culture is emerging.
“In terms of public health, getting kids active, attacking the obesity epidemic and internet addiction, getting football into the PE curriculum has made some progress,” says Sullivan. “But instilling a love for playing football at youth level faces big obstacles: parents who don’t want their kids risking injuries or taking time away from exam prep or piano lessons, and kids who don’t want to spend their precious hours of downtime on anything other than video games.
“Building a lucrative domestic sports economy, with football stimulating growth in other areas, has not gone as planned. Football culture is not something you can just wish into existence. It takes nurturing and there is a lot of other stuff going on in China that is more resonant for consumers. For the CSL, it is impossible to compete with all the football from Europe, the NBA, eSports and so on. It doesn’t help that China is so big, with only a small number of CSL clubs, and so many clubs in financial difficulty right now.”
There is not much good news here for Chinese football. The league is in disarray, with last season’s champions dissolved and the league’s biggest and most successful club under severe threat. The national team is set to miss out on World Cup qualification once again. There is always the belief that a higher standard of player is about to emerge but there are not too many candidates to follow Wu Lei to the leading European leagues in the near future. China’s investments in European football, notably in England, have not brought much success either.
There was a boom period for Chinese football — or at least for the league and for those who stood to profit from the moment’s largesse — and now it appears to be in a state of recession. The impact of COVID-19 was unforeseeable. But even without that shock, it seemed inevitable the bubble would burst sooner rather than later.
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Professor Chadwick feels the rise and fall of the CSL is reflective of a wider story, of President Xi using football as a tool to assert his power, encouraging a surge of investment in the game and then moving on. The long-term objectives remain but priorities change.
“There does seem to be a change in agenda for the president as an individual, which is reflected in a change for Chinese football as a whole,” Chadwick says. “Less big money, fewer stars, stopping clubs from borrowing loads of money and behaving ostentatiously.
“That taps into Xi’s policy of ‘common prosperity’. It’s about the rich not racing ahead and giving poorer members of society the opportunity to work and improve their living standards. If you’ve got major corporations spending fortunes on footballers, particularly foreign ones, that is absolutely not consistent with ‘common prosperity’.
“What is consistent is funding the grassroots, ensuring kids have access to football. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a reinforcement of the policy that all kids should be able to play at school. That’s an egalitarian approach which is entirely consistent with that notion of ‘common prosperity’. Paying Carlos Tevez £600,000 a week, on the other hand, is not.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Tom Slator)