After breaking the market with millionaire signings and unprecedented salaries, Chinese football monopolized all the covers. Five years later, history has changed so much that the reigning Super League champion was unable to register for the season because of their financial problems. This is the picture of the league he came to Juan Quintero, in Shenzhen.
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Alarms went off in China in late February when the team that won the league in 2020, the Jiangsu Suning, He announced that he was suspending his operations as he was unable to deal with the debt problems that prevented him from paying part of his salaries to his footballers during the campaign.
The coach, the Romanian Olaroiu, and its biggest star, the Brazilian Teixeira, had already left the ship after the title due to defaults.
Its current owner, the Suning conglomerate, has been forced to sell 23% of its shares to obtain liquidity, although its founder has already warned that they would turn off the tap at expenses unrelated to its main business, that of distribution.
These plans have not only meant that the now-named Jiangsu FC is on the verge of extinction – barely two years after it was supposedly about to sign Balearic Gareth if he doesn’t find a buyer in the short term, but which have also resonated in Italy, as Inter Milan are controlled by this company.
And in England, the Premier League ended up canceling a multimillion-dollar broadcasting contract with PPTV, Suning’s subsidiary, after it failed to meet agreed payments.
political issue
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According to the local press, the Jiangsu – which in recent years had Ramires or Miranda in its ranks and Fabio Capello on its bench – is for sale for a yuan, but whoever takes it will have to take over the debt, which would mean a disbursement of more than 60 million euros in the first season alone
“The fact that no one wants to take over the club is not too good a sign for the future of Chinese football,” warns Cameron Wilson, founder of Chinese football specialist Wild East Football.
The analyst tells Efe that the last-minute appearance of a buyer is still “a possibility” because the situation is “too ridiculous even by the standards of Chinese football,” but “they are ending time “. “It’s one of the worst things that has happened in the history of Chinese football,” he laments. How has Chinese football been able to reach this situation just five years after the government announced a plan to become a world football superpower by 2050?
“I suspect there has been some political change, and someone has said that we need to go down a couple of steps in the football project,” says Wilson, who recalls that the plan “made everyone believe it was a great opportunity.” , especially to large companies, who thought they could “get political favors by investing in football.”
Asked about the influence of the coronavirus, the Scotsman completely ruled it out: “Clubs didn’t make money before anyway, they can’t survive without a company that pays the bills behind it.”
In his view, China wanted international recognition, but the lack of progress in local football – which is reflected in the latest failures of the national team – would have made the authorities begin to be ashamed of excessive spending on signings and salaries. . In fact, in the last two years the CFA, the national federation, has announced successive reforms to prevent clubs from continuing to spend millions on international stars as it is considered totally unsustainable.
‘China is getting fatal’
The Jiangsu is not the only case: last year, the Tianjin Quanjian, Team through which passed Duck, Luis Fabiano or Witsel, disappeared after severing ties with its sponsor for a court scandal, and this year many teams are surviving thanks to state investments.
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And this is only in the Superliga: in the second and third divisions, more than a dozen teams were expelled last year for failing to meet financial requirements.
And more clubs will end up disappearing, according to Wilson. The expert considers that the “extraordinary” level of political interference in football has had a lot to do with this decline: “Football people are either not the ones who make the decisions or they can’t make them because they always have to “With politics at the helm, we wouldn’t see a fraction of all this ridiculousness.”
But for now, in Chinese football “everything can change at any moment” according to the will of someone powerful: “And then all the plans have to change, and all the billions that have been spent on they have been wasted time and time again.
The founder of Wild East Football believes that the authorities did not understand the difficulty of their goals: “They set out to make money, but it is not that there was a plan. China thought that building football is like building bridges or railways.” . While it’s still hard to predict what will happen to football in China, one thing is clear: “They’re getting fatal.”
Wilson, who has been following Asian country football for two decades, no longer even believes it is possible to make the team one of the best in the world by 2050, as Beijing wanted.
And neither do they Drogba, Mascherano, Oscar, Hulk, Lavezzi, Executioner, Duck, Anelka or Ramires they still want to take their careers to the Superleague: “I don’t think we’ll see this type of player coming to China again until the finances (of the clubs) are more rational. And it will take a long time. “.
EFE