A new TV deal for the Chinese Super League will be worth £132m – last year it was £1m
long been popular in East Asia and there is a well-worn route from Sao Paolo to Shanghai, Seoul and Sapparo. Samba style still excites in this part of the world, and players have always been willing to travel – the agents, the network were in place. These days there is just a better quality of player heading there, due to bigger amounts of cash on offer. The debate in Brazil is whether the exodus (four of Corinthians’ 2015 title-winning team are now in China) is good for the players and their role in the national team, but the hope in Beijing is that better foreign players will raise the level of the locals.
“The good foreign players who aren’t in China just for the money are happy to help Chinese players improve,” says Damjanovic. “The Chinese players are still not as good as Korean or Japanese players, but the gap will become smaller.” Guangzhou’s local lads have certainly developed, although that may well have happened anyway – after all, playing under coaches such as Marcello Lippi and Luiz Felipe Scolari will have made a difference.
The foreigners’ power is limited, however. Chinese teams can buy only five foreign players each. One must be Asian, and only three of the four others can play at any one time. Every time a Chinese club takes to the pitch there must be seven local players, although there have been rumblings of some of the bigger clubs seeking to change this rule.
For the moment, to challenge at the top you need some good local talent, and fans of Jiangsu, while excited about the big names, are slightly perplexed at the club’s new-found wealth and the seemingly scattergun approach to signings. “It is exciting in one sense but we don’t seem to have a strategy,” says Luo Ming, a Jiangsu fan. “We’re just trying to sign any foreign player who is famous. It doesn’t matter how good these foreign players are if you don’t have good Chinese players. We sold our best local player and haven’t replaced him. Many teams in China now have good foreign players; we need to focus on domestic players, as that’s what will make the difference. At the moment, fourth will be a good season for us, but we are looking forward to the Asian Champions League.”
The current contingent of Chinese players is not good enough to challenge for global supremacy. China does not send players to the big leagues of Europe, as South Korea and Japan do, simply because the country has not yet produced the required talent. Guangzhou’s Zhang Linpeng could be an exception: interest from Chelsea and Real Madrid may be an attempt to win support in the Middle Kingdom, but the defender is good enough regardless. At the moment, though, there aren’t many others who are. But this generation of players came through an erratic development system with often mediocre coaches, sub-par facilities and an uncaring government.
That has always been a problem – but there was a bigger one. Despite the talk of 1.3 billion people surely producing a top-class XI sooner or later, people just don’t play the game. In 2010, the stats said there were fewer than 10,000 registered under-12 players. Japan, with a tenth of the population, boasted 300,000. This was the real reason for underachievement. Walk around Beijing or Shanghai and you don’t see kids on the street or in the park kicking a ball about. Parents just didn’t regard football as a viable career path for their children.
In November 2014, the Ministry of Education announced that football would be compulsory in Chinese schools. Officials are ensuring that by next year, 20,000 schools will have new football pitches and training facilities, with the ambitious aim of creating 100,000 new players. Clubs such as Guangzhou have invested in their facilities and academies, and the government is to build pitches all over the country.
Tom Byer is a youth development expert employed by the Chinese government as a consultant for the programme. “The Ministry of Education applied for 350 million RMB (around £37m) from the National Financial Department,” he says. “All of the provincial Education Bureaus are also putting in significant amounts. There are lots of activities going on, along with many sponsors who are investing as well.”
Going forward, kids will have many more advantages. Football was always popular, but the league is booming. A new TV deal for the Chinese Super League will be worth around £132m – some jump from £1m only last year. More money is coming, attendances are rising (set to break the 25,000 average mark this season), salaries for local players are growing and the profession will start to look a little more attractive for kids and parents. Throw in the better facilities, the greater quality and quantity of coaching, and regular school football, and more children will be playing the game. One problem that needs to be solved, however, is that most of the foreign talent being signed will fill creative positions, leaving none for the locals. The goalscoring charts will be mainly foreign, which could well be an issue for the national team in years to come. If this can be addressed, the future is bright. Amid all the spending, this is the bigger picture, the long-term game: producing better Chinese players and making China a world power. Watch this space.