The Chinese Super League in 2023 - What the hell happened here?!
Like a firework, the CSL was once loud and impossible to ignore but now in 2023 it has all but disappeared from the football world's collective consciousness.
For over a thousand years, the search for the elixir of life had been an obsession for many Chinese Emperors and these alchemists knew that they would be paid handsomely (and likely able to drink from it themselves) if they were able to discover it.
Different mixtures, potions and concoctions had all been created and trialled but to no avail. One Emperor, Qin Shi Huang (the one with the terracotta army that they found in some farmer’s back garden) even went so far as to drink wine laced with honey… oh and mercury, thinking it would solve his problems.
He died at the age of 49… presumably of mercury poisoning.
But finally, after years of searching and experimenting, these alchemists had a breakthrough in 800AD, however not in the way they thought they would.
By mixing sulphur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate in the search for the ability to grant longer lives, this alchemist actually gave the world a way to shorten millions. He had created gunpowder (a substance that quite literally became worth more than its weight in gold).
However long before it was used in weapons around 400 years later, it was packed into small bamboo tubes and thrown on open flames to celebrate weddings and births… the first fireworks had been born.
These weren’t the fireworks that we know today; the obnoxiously loud, colourful and overrated rockets that are set off relentlessly from the end of October till just after New Year’s Day did not come into fashion until the 1600s in England (I hate them, I hate them so much).
But the fundamental ideas were there.
They were impressive and caught your attention for a split second but after that, they fizzled out. The thought was that they’d scare off evil spirits. Where the rumour started that ghosts are scared of loud noises came from I don’t know, but it was at least a symbolic gesture; spectacle over substance.
Fast forward just over 1200 years and China created another product in the quest for ‘immortality’. Something impressive for what seemed like a split second before fizzling out; that looked impressive on the surface but lacked the foundations underneath.
The Chinese Super League (as fans around the world grew to know it in the 2010s)1.
But now as we look at 2023, like a firework a few seconds after the launch in the blackness of the night sky, it has disappeared from view completely. But why?
Before I continue this piece I want to say that the international break is the worst (especially when you’re a writer).
You’re robbed of any new discourse, and the discourse that replaces it is dragged up from the deepest gutters possible. People were beefing Luca Toni this week, a man I have not thought about in over six years.
But after cutting through the same Ronaldinho compilations and Kane vs Rooney debates we see every time club football pauses in the middle of a season, I found an interesting piece on Chinese football from Tariq Panja in the New York Times.
In 2011, President Xi Jinping wanted to etch his name into sporting history (achieving a form of immortality). Due to his love of the sport, he wanted to make China a footballing superpower both in terms of their domestic league and their national team.
This was announced in 2011 but in 2016, the ‘China Football Reform and Development Overall Plan’ was announced and met with great fanfare (well that’s how it was reported by the Chinese media).
By 2030, China would be the best team in Asia; by 2050 they would be the best team in the world.
However we are in 2023, and football seems to be effectively dying in China. Years of financial mismanagement, broken promises and a general decline of interest in the sport means that Xi’s dream is over, or at least hobbling along on its last legs.
The men’s national team ranks 80th in the world, seven places higher than where they were in 2010, but nine places lower than their peak position in this period (in 2011 and 2017).2
It should also be noted that three of their best players are Brazilians who became Chinese citizens by naturalisation - Elkeson (Ai Kesen), Fernandinho (Fei Nanduo) and Aloisio (Luo Guofo)3.
The call-up of Elkeson especially was unpopular as he became the first player to play for China with no Chinese Ancestry whatsoever. Former striker Hao Haidong told Southern People Weekly back in 2019:
“The naturalised players have no blood ties with the country, and that is scary. Are we becoming better even if we become world champions? Just because the FIFA policy allows naturalisation, should countries around the world do that? You want to have long-term growth… yet you are getting all these naturalised players on the team just for one World Cup.”
The questions that arose from this decision about the strength of the league and the progress of the project we will talk about shortly. Away from the national team, the league itself is it not faring much better.
Several teams have disbanded due to their unsustainable sporting models. Jiangsu Suning won the league in 2021… and then disbanded only a few months later4. A statement from the Chinese government after the announcement read:
“The Chinese Football Association will continue to work hard to implement the “China Football Reform and Development Overall Plan”, continue to promote football reform, strengthen various basic football work with youth football as the main content, improve the professional league system, and better unite the national football forces. Work hard for the progress of Chinese football!”
However, this seems like defiance in the face of imminent adversity. These are not small teams who are struggling to compete; these are the best teams in the country collapsing.
The report by Panja states that the league is likely to restart in April 2023 with a reduced roster, but with the recent news that Guangzhou FC (formerly Evergrande), a historic club who were relegated due to their financial troubles last season but were expected to return after a season in the wilderness (China League One), have also disbanded weeks before the new season, real doubts are starting to surface about whether it is on its last legs.
But how did we get here? Was it just illusions of grandeur or did something go fundamentally wrong?
Turn back the clocks six or seven years, and the Chinese Super League was impossible to ignore. Everyone could have told you where they were when Alex Texeira rejected Liverpool and instead went to (the now-non-existent) Jiangsu Suning.
He was just one of many players from the South American country to join a Chinese club. Others include Hulk (who moved for £46m), Paulinho (who moved under the 100% transfer taxation rule, but we’ll get to that), Renato Augusto, Ramires, Vagner Love etc.
This is where the problems began to surface.
Not only were these players signed for inflated transfer fees, but they were also handed massive contracts. One of the most notable examples was Oscar, who was signed for a record £60m and turned down offers from the likes of Juventus to earn £400k a week at Shanghai Port.
The financial power that they were able to wield had the rest of the footballing world worried. Arsene Wenger told the media during the height of China’s spending spree:
“(Chinese clubs) seem to have the financial power to lure every player from Europe. There is a very strong political desire in China to become a big player and we (the Premier League) have to be worried.”
However, it’s clear that Oscar, like many other players, moved for the payday rather than the project. Though he is still in China today, his initial plan was only to remain in China for 2-3 years to play football at the highest level. He told Copa90 at the time:
“Every football player, or every person who works, wants to earn money to help their families. I came from a social background in Brazil that is very poor. We didn’t have anything. This is the fruit of my work and when I earn this, it is because I conquered it. The same way I came here, I will be able to return to Europe. Whatever decision I make, somebody will talk good or bad about it.
"All the foreign players who come here are at a really high level. China has incredible financial power and sometimes makes offers that players can’t refuse."5
This was only one example, Carlos Tevez famously referred to his time in China as a ‘holiday’… he earned £615k a week6, only scored four goals and criticised the quality of the league after Shanghai Shenhua claimed he was unfit to play.
This mindset of bringing in the best players was meant to raise the stature of the league, but instead, it undermined it. It was a very expensive spectacle, much like your average fireworks display.
Funds were not invested in developing the domestic pool and improving Chinese players and given they made up a good majority of the league, this compromised both the domestic competition and the national team.
And because the league was not improving, the billions that were being funnelled into the project were seeing little to no return. This was a massively unsustainable model; they were setting money on fire and watching it burn (ironically a metaphor often used to describe fireworks).
Seeing that the model was not only a financial black hole, but also that the league’s transfer trend directly opposed the project that they had envisioned, the Chinese FA took swift and decisive action.
They thought they were cutting the rope that the CSL had put around its neck to save it, but instead, they were dropping it into a pool of sharks below.
A 100% transfer tax was placed on any incoming transfer from outside the league. This would famously apply to Paulinho, who was sold to Barcelona for €40m, but then bought back a year and a half later (after being on loan for six months of his spell) for €42m, which ended up being €84m thanks to the transfer tax.
They also implemented a foreign player restriction which meant that teams could only have three on their sides. This partnered with a wage cap of what amounted to £8.6m a year total for all their global stars, saw a mass exodus from the league.
The aforementioned Alex Teixeira headed to Besiktas while players like Axel Witsel and Yannick Carrasco departed back to Europe. I’m not going to go through them all but just know that it fundamentally depleted the league of quality.
And this created a crisis of identity within the CSL.
The foundations for the league had been built on the big-name stars that their clubs were able to bring in while their domestic talent had fallen by the wayside. By causing a large proportion of this talent to leave, the Chinese FA had handicapped themselves and interest in the league waned.
And this was only compounded by the coronavirus pandemic.
China was hit harder than most, with incredibly tight restrictions. The lack of gate receipts and other revenue streams only further piled on the financial problems for Chinese clubs.
The academies that Xi had also set out to create could not function, as they were largely focused on getting students into the game, and domestic talent stopped being produced.
There is however the consideration that the pandemic only accelerated the process rather than was the direct cause of some of these clubs which had spent beyond their means, collapsing.
Throw in some recent corruption allegations against the Chinese FA and you have the recipe for the perfect storm of mismanagement.
So is China’s project to become a ‘footballing superpower’ dead and buried? Well yes and no.
In its current format, the CSL is pretty much dead. It spent way beyond its means and created an untenable model that did not fuel China’s greater ambitions; its flame has danced across the night sky and now has flickered out. Cameron Wilson (a Chinese Football expert) put it best when he said:
"The CSL obviously hasn't reached its goal to be a successful league which contributes positively to Chinese football as a whole.”
But what we must consider is that the endpoint of China’s original plan was all the way in 2050, and that is still 27 years away. A lot of good can be done in that time and maybe this initial misstep may do a lot to put them on the right path.
Jonathan Wilson, a professor specialising in Chinese studies, told The Athletic back in 2021:
“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.”
However, he did go on to stress how in the greater political context (because we must not forget that this project is driven by the government and the president), the goal of becoming a ‘footballing superpower’ has fallen much further down the agenda after recent events.
In terms of what the future holds, it seems like there is still ambition from Xi as late as last year to try and make football a national sport, but his approach was much more naturalistic.
Less big-money signings and top-heavy projects, more investment in grassroots football and starting from the ground up. Experts have said this is more in line with Xi’s over-arching policy of ‘common prosperity.’7
But with the recent team collapses, the corruption allegations, political problems, cultural divides and long-lasting effects of the coronavirus, it may be too much to overcome for still fledgeling sport to take hold.
Xi thought he had found a surefire way to change the course of history within his nation and achieve immortality by making his team a sporting superpower, but instead, we are now questioning whether he’s swallowed a mouthful of mercury.
You don’t know how hard I was trying to avoid being this meme when I was writing out this analogy and then piece:
The women’s national team has fluctuated during the same period but currently sits in 13th the same position as they were in 2010 before the project’s commencement (it also doesn’t seem to be the focus of China’s project).
Following their naturalisation, all three players were given Chinese names which they wear on their shirts.
This doesn’t bode well for Inter Milan who are also primarily owned by the Suning group.
This is a very common mindset among Brazillian footballers, they are not only lifting themselves out of poverty but their entire families and the generations that come after them.
If you think this is obscene, Ezequiel Lavezzi is still there and was earning £798k a week at one point (and might still be today), he has scored three goals this season.
The rich aren’t able to just race ahead and the poor are given a chance to keep pace with them.