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When one Chinese Super League coach sat down last week and was asked about his side’s foreign players, he delivered an honest, and telling response.
‘They are now out of my control,’ Chongqing Liangjiang Athletic head coach Chang Woe-ryong told reporters. In truth, no one has possessed any control in the country’s top flight for some time.
Over the past 12 months, Chinese football has unravelled at an alarming rate. Top teams have folded and stories have emerged of players going unpaid, with some even sent home with their own laundry.
It is a farcry from the brave project that saw money pumped into the game in the Far East, based on the dream of President Xi Jingping see his nation become a genuine competitor for World Cup glory.
At its height, the CSL was turning the heads of the football world, with astronomical wages being offered as they competed with the world’s most established clubs to attract some of the globe’s best talent.
It worked, as the likes of Oscar, Paulinho, Rafa Benitez and Marouane Fellaini all swapped the Premier League for China, some of the most recognisable names in the game bringing the gaze of Europe with them.
The Chinese Super League is beginning to pay for years of unregulated spending on players
One transfer in particular, though, caught the attention more than others. Carlos Tevez, upon leaving Juventus, was offered a contract by Shanghai Shenhua in 2016 worth £650,000-a-week. It equated to the former Manchester United and City striker earning a pound a second.
‘I remember doing that stat with Dan Walker on BBC Breakfast and he nearly fell off the sofa,’ Rob Wilson, a football finance expert at Sheffield Hallam University. tells Sportsmail.
‘Tevez was able to earn the average yearly salary of someone that lived in Shanghai in three-and-a-half days. You’ve got this completely polarised situation against the back drop of some fairly significant poverty.
‘The Carlos Tevezes of this world really treated the Chinese Super League as a…
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Source : dailymail
