Prior to 2012, China was not seen as a dynamic player on the world football stage. It was mostly seen as a destination for a certain breed of veteran players to see out the
remainder of their careers. In fact, Chinese football was probably at its
lowest ebb following a bribery scandal in 2010 which saw the vice chairman of the Chinese Football
Association (CFA) and the former head of refereeing accused of
corruption. As a result of this, the Chinese Government placed a nationwide
ban on all football gambling and began to rebuild.
By the summer of 2012, though, many notable footballers surprisingly made the move
to East Asia. Names such as Didier Drogba, Nicolas Anelka, Seydou Keita and
Yakubu all signed for Chinese clubs in a relatively short period of time. In
addition to this, many highly respectable and reputable names in management began to migrate to China.
This included the likes of former World Cup winning manager, Marcello Lippi
(who is now manager of the Chinese National Team), when he took over at Guangzhou
Evergrande – reportedly earning £30million over the course of his two and a
half year deal with the club. It soon became apparent that Chinese teams had what seemed to
be an almost infinite
amount of cash at their disposal and were not afraid to flaunt it to
attract talent.
Throughout the 2015/16 Chinese Super League (CSL) season, more
high-profile players were being brought in for hefty price tags. Long-time
Liverpool target, Alex Teixeira, joined Jiangsu Suning for a stunning
£42.5million from Shakhtar Donetsk. This was soon followed by the acquisition
of Atletico Madrid forward, Jackson Martinez, who had failed to impress at
Atletico during his short six-month stint with the club. However his under-performance didn't stop Guangzhou Evergrande paying an extortionate fee of £35.7million for the Colombian international.
In February 2016, forgotten winger Ezequiel Lavezzi became one of the highest
paid footballers in the world when he joined Hebei China Fortune from Paris
Saint Germain – earning a weekly salary of £493,000. The spending did not stop
there. In January 2017, Chelsea flop Oscar joined Shanghai SIPG for £60million and
Shanghai Shenhua captured Carlos Tevez and made him the highest paid footballer
in the world - earning a reported weekly salary of £615,000 a week.
This outlandish spending marked a turning point in the way Chinese clubs
were approaching the game. With the sudden and dramatic influx of expensive
foreign players joining the CSL, a quota for non-APAC footballers was placed on teams in late January 2017. New procedures meant that
only five “foreign” players could be named in any one squad, and only three
were allowed to be in the starting eleven. With this new rule imposed, players
like Chelsea’s Diego Costa and Dortmund’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang quickly
turned their back on offers from China and chose to remain at their current
clubs.
It is widely believed that this quota was placed on teams as economists
had predicted that if Chinese clubs continued to spend at this rate, they would
be unable to sustain healthy economic growth in the
future. With new rules and regulations in place, Chinese football teams will
now have to closely monitor the ways in which they can improve their squads
with strategic transfers.
Perhaps this will mark the end of a “Golden Era” in Chinese football or will we start seeing uncapped foreign players being nationalized by China as a way to escape these new
rulings? Only time will tell.
daniel_clemenson@outlook.com
