Goal Rush
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Chinese soccer fans are good at consoling themselves with humor. Disappointed by their national team time and time again, some have come to the conclusion that Chinese players only face two obstacles to qualification for the World Cup one is their left foot, and the other is their right.
Recently, fan cynicism has been pushed to new heights, with teams now competing to throw money at new superstar international signings, seemingly mismatched with a chronically unprofessional soccer league. Long-suffering Chinese fans jeer that while it might be difficult to choose 11 quality players out of its population of 1.3 billion, world-class international players seem in ready supply.
Big Money, Big Names
China’s latest big-name imports include former Chelsea forward Didier Drogba, and Italy’s World Cup-winning coach Marcello Lippi. Last season, Drogba helped his English Premier League club to victory in the UEFA Champions League, the highest honor in European club soccer. Having arrived in Shanghai in mid-July after months of speculation, his new club Shanghai Shenhua will pay him 12 million euros (US$14.7m) annually for the next two and half years, making him one of the highest-paid soccer players in the world.
Lippi’s annual pay from his Chinese team Guangzhou Evergrande, where he took over this May, was reported to be 8 million euros(US$9.8m), second only to José Mourinho, who coaches Spanish giant Real Madrid. Drogba’s former Chelsea strike partner Nicolas Anelka had joined Shenhua late last year, where his annual salary of 10.6 million euros (US$13m) was, before Drogba’s arrival, more than all his other teammates combined.
Evergrande’s Argentinean midfielder Darío Leonardo Conca, who joined the team last July, also ranks among the world’s 20 highest-paid soccer players, taking home US$8 million per year.
Loose purse strings at Evergrande and Shenhua have triggered a soccer spending-spree among Chinese clubs, with almost all the attention focused on the international market. The China Super League(CSL), the country’s top soccer league, spent around 36 million euros(US$44m) signing international players last year, making it the 15th highest-spending league worldwide, according to the German soccer analysis website transfermarkt.de.
The CSL’s activity in the transfer market outstrips tenfold that of both the Japanese “J-League” and Korean “K-League,” two nations who frequently qualify for the World Cup, for which China has qualified only once. More than 80 percent of the transfer fees in the CSL were spent on international players over the five years to 2011, according to a survey by Netease, a major Chinese Web portal.
Demand from China has hiked up the prices for soccer players. For instance, Lucas Barrios, the Paraguayan forward and regular benchwarmer for the German club Borussia Dortmund, was signed by Evergrande with a contract worth 6.7 million euros (US$8.2m) per year, three times higher than that of the star forward of his former team.
More than 40 percent of total salaries in the CSL, over the last five years, were paid to international players, as clubs aimed to take a short-cut to top performance by signing expensive foreign players, rather than investing time, money and effort in developing the local talent pool, according to the Netease report.
Bounty-ball
Despite their willingness to spend on big names, however, clubs are apparently less concerned with the ground beneath their feet no CSL club owns its own stadium, all of them renting public venues that are also leased out for concerts and other large-scale events.
For most of these soccer teams, investment is geared towards immediate, eye-catching impact, a strategy also popular with the China Football Association (CFA), the government body that regulates the sport. The CFA is notorious for its enthusiasm for famous coaches and disregard for long-term grassroots cultivation, since quick results are more likely to translate into quick promotions for sports officials.
Even in big cities like Beijing, soccer fields are rarely seen in local communities. Only 10,000 children below the age of 12 are signed up to junior soccer leagues in China, while in Japan, with a population only one tenth of China’s, the number is 36 times that.
However, it seems that money can indeed buy success Guangzhou Evergrande won the championship in its first season after promotion into the top league. The strength of its pricey roster, which includes more than half of China’s national starting lineup, is simply unprecedented.
In addition to the spending spree in the transfer market, teams are also competing to mark up their match-winning bonuses for players. Evergrande collectively awards its team a staggering 3 million yuan(around US$47,000) per victory, and imposes an equivalent fine for each loss. Other teams have followed suit, and some offer particularly high bonuses for beating Evergrande.
With so much money flying around, observers may well question where it is coming from. Certainly not from TV rights the State owns a monopoly on CSL match broadcasts, and clubs do not see any of the profits. In fact, clubs in the league draw their revenue almost entirely from ticket sales and sponsorship, which totaled only 500 million yuan (US$78m) over the 2011-12 season. Over the same period, their investment added up to 3 billion yuan (US$469m). Drogba’s salary is thought to be close to Shanghai Shenhua’s total annual revenue.
While no club has any hope of making ends meet, running a prestigious soccer club can still be a sound business option to enhance brand awareness for its investors despite the comparatively poor standard of play, soccer remains the most talked-about sport in China. Thus, almost all investors name their soccer team after their company, and clubs are frequently renamed to reflect shifts in their shareholder structure.
Evergrande, a major housing developer and the boldest investor in the soccer field with outgoings of more than 700 million yuan(US$109m) last season, claimed that media attention through soccer had brought it a fifteen-fold return on its investment. The signings of Conca and Lippi, together with the club’s extravagant bonus scheme, ensured the company’s name remained in national headlines. State broadcaster CCTV even arranged a live broadcast of Lippi’s contractinking ceremony.
Evergrande’s revenue grew sevenfold in the year 2010, the year after it began investing in soccer. In 2011, it doubled that growth.
Ironically though, when Shanghai Shenhua signed the China soccer league’s first international player in 1995 with an annual pay of US$6,000, China stood at 40th on the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) rankings. But its current standing, despite millions of dollars spent on transfer fees, is 76th. Big money might win quick victories for clubs and favor for businessmen and officials, but it is unlikely to win respect for the country’s national team, and certainly not the hearts of the nation’s fans.