Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

[roryfsmith]

China the Next Football League Superpower

So with all the signings going to China. It looks like the Chinese Super League will be the next global superpower of world football.

Population
China is the worlds biggest country. So has potential for teams with massive support and therefore great atmospheres, competition and branding.

Stadiums
They have some great stadiums to use, such as the Beijing Olympic stadium.

Global Brand
China has a massive Diaspora. China has the resources to use football as an effort to increase the soft power of China. China is a historic great nation, China has probably looked at the economic benefits countries like England, Spain, Italy and Germany get from having large football leagues, and decided we want a slice of that pie. And when you look at what China has done to the European steel and other industries, imagine what it could do to European football leagues.
The Chinese communists may look at having a global football league brand as a massive bonus for the Chinese state. A Chinese league could be used to advertise Chinese products globally, to paint a picture of a successful dynamic country to the outside world as they try to do with the Olympics and as the Soviet Union tried to do with their investment in their Olympics stars.
International football is not so commercially useful as having a successful league. Since even the best international teams only get to compete in the World Cup every four years, and one off games are unpredictable. But China may look to Britain and see the commercial benefits of the English leagues and the Old Firm of Celtic and Rangers in Scotland, and consider that investing billions in bringing great football players to China is a massive bonus.

Reverse Global Brand
In the past European sides have attempted to grow their brand in the far east. We have been arrogantly ambitious in expecting to develop our brands like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United and Bayern Munich in the eager football markets of Asia. But now the boot could be on the other foot. If all the great players move to China, and they have an exciting league then we could end up with Europeans, in Scotland, England, Spain, Germany supporting Chinese clubs. How ironic would that be?

Is the league a threat to Europe?
I think it is. The commercial muscle and ambition of China is enormous. How can even large individual European nations compete with a rapidly growing superpower like China? If the Chinese state decides to back football in China, and have super clubs worth a billion pounds to advertise their brands to the outside world. Then what chance to we have.

Will it be run like England or Spain?
I think spreading the wealth among the top clubs of the league would work best, as you want an exciting competitive league. China has the resources to have 16 massive clubs rather than 2 or 3 super clubs and the rest all average clubs.
In Scotland we can only support 2 massive football clubs n Celtic and Rangers. But China, like England and Germany can support many big clubs.

Supporters in Britain
Imagine if instead of British kids supporting Celtic, Rangers, Manchester United, Liverpool, Newcastle United, Manc City, Arsenal, etc: that they grew up supporting Chinese clubs like Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao.
Guangzhou Evergrande play in South East China and have been the most recently successful Chinese side. They get average crowds of over 40,000, while Beijing Guoan in North East China, and Chongqing Lifan in central China, get crowds in excess of 30,000. There still needs to be some bigger clubs, though to attract global audiences to Chinese soccer.
Shanghai SIPG, get decent crowds and so do Shijiazhuang Ever Bright, and Jiangsu Suning.

Will the TV audiences be attracted to Chinese Soccer?
If they can get big teams, with big crowds and great players, then surely it will be a rival to TV muscle of the European leagues.
When people watch foreign sports leagues, they want to see quality players, excitement, representatives from their own country, competition, big crowds, and stadiums, integrity, glamour. I think, with investment China can get all those things, but the important step would be to get 16 teams who get bigger crowds than the top 16 teams in the English, Spanish, German, Italian and French leagues.

Invest in China football merchandise
It would be a good idea to invest in Chinese soccer merchandise. I personally have programme from the Celtic v China game. But it would be good to have some foreign merchandise from China.

The Chinese Beckham
Who will be the foreign player who goes to China to bring the Chinese public to love soccer?

Will it change European soccer?
As well as less top players coming to Europe. A big step might be that UEFA decide that the only way our European nations can compete with China, is if we have a European Super League. Or at least more regional merging of the league such as North European Super League, a Eastern European Super League.
Also we will take the World Club Championship more seriously, as Chinese clubs could have more money than European sides.

Drawbacks of the Chinese system
There has been a limit on the number of foreign players.
I personally do not think this is useful in the aim to make the Chinese league the best in the world. If you want the best teams in the world, you need to flexible to have all your players from other countries. Otherwise you could end up with 6 average Chinese players and 5 foreign superstars. But even worse the superstars may not want to come to China, if they know that there will be 5 domestic players who are not as good as the players at Real Madrid, PSG or Barcelona.

[G-Man]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

As well as less top players coming to Europe.

fewer

[roryfsmith]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

I had to retake my English GCSE. But I do have a degree. So i have done well.

[Various Artist]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

Rory, I can only applaud your indefatigable desire to start new streams of discussion on these forums. But have you considered joining in with any of the dozens of already active threads, engage in a bit of ongoing conversation? There must be something that piques your interest, surely?

[EIM]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

Big fan of roryfsmith.

Why
He has a distinctive style.

What style
Like Wikipedia or a very structured letter to Shoot.

What does the future hold
More threads like this hypothesising very fully on a subject none of us had really thought about before, and what we had considered about it we hadn't thought about in this way. Maybe also a link to a blog.

What's for tea tonight
Chicken wings and rice.

[Etienne]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

I think this is an actually interesting development. Anyone who thinks that Europe is destined to inevitably rule the football world should only look at the chaos among the rest of the world that the IPL is wreaking in cricket.

Clearly Chinese clubs now have the finance to ensure they are the destination of choice for players for whom pay packet is the only concern, surpassing the Gulf. But it's a long way from that to being able to attract the best players in the world, which will require a high level of competition and marketability too. But China is a big enough market to provide that in the future - which Qatar never could be.

(And I still await anyone explaining what possible miscommunication could be brought about by people using 'les' rather than 'fewer'.)

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

To be fair, we haven't had a thread on the Chinese Super League. Their clubs only ever come up in passing really on the ocasional AFC Champions League threads.

Alex Teixeira joining Jiangsu Suning - at this stage of a promising career, when both Liverpool and Chelsea were courting him - is a game-changer, I feel. Previously, Chinese clubs had been able to attract big-name managers (Guangzhou have Big Phil, and Teixeira's new manager is Dan Petrescu) but not really any players troubling World Cup Panini albums. That looks like it's about to change.

Will that mean the CSL genuinely begins to start attracting interest - even support - from European fans? I very much doubt it, soon. There's the simple cultural barrier, for a start, in that probably only around 1% of Europeans have ever visited any of the Chinese cities now hosting clubs, so have no even remote attachment to them in the way that people might support New York, Miami, Chicago or LA, in American sports, because they've been to them or know the places from other media. Interest in particular clubs will grow as more familiar players join them, but interest to support is a big leap. See Indian Premier League in the cricket - quite a few watch it over here now, as many of the world's top players are contracted, but I doubt many actively support any particular team. It will take twenty. thirty years of familiarity for English fans to begin to hold an interest in the end of the CSL in the way they might about, say, the Bundesliga or La Liga, and even their interest in those leagues is probably 5% at best.

It will take a lot of saturation coverage, and a lot of background explanatory stuff about not just the teams but the cities, and China in general, I feel, to one day have fans here tuning in at 9am to watch the CSL games. A bit like Channel 4 admirably did with Serie A when they first began televising that in the 80s.

[Borracho]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

There was a book that came out around 1992 called The Guinness Record of World Soccer, written by a bloke called Guy Oliver. It was about 700 pages long, a big thick hardback. And it contained a wealth of detail about world football, with nearly every country in the world getting its own section that listed all its results in international competition, its top scorers, its most successful clubs etc etc. Exactly the sort of book that was mega-useful back then, but has since been rendered obsolete by the internet.

One line from it has stuck in my head all these years. In the Asian section, he wrote: "In the future, China will undoubtedly become the leading power in the region, if not the world. Sheer weight of numbers will ensure that this is the case."

Twenty-three years later, all China has to show for its numerical advantage is one embarrassing pointless and goalless first-round appearance at the 2002 World Cup. Still, as a wise man once said, the future's a long time.

Then again, I've spent a fair bit of the last couple of months reading article after article telling me that the Chinese economy is very close to going tits up in spectacular fashion, with potentially appalling consequences for the western world's economies as well. So . . .

[ursus arctos]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

Given that all of this "investment" has been funded by megalomaniacal tycoons who have reaped the rewards of a massive bubble, I would suggest that we see what happens to their attachment to football after that bubble bursts before making long term predictions.

It isn't as if Chinese tycoons don't have previous for walking away from massive investments.



I'd also question the relevance of the Chinese diaspora. There simply isn't any real basis for diaspora football fans to latch on to these clubs, which are almost all recently-created marketing vehicles for entities that didn't exist when they (or their relatives) left China.

[dalliance]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

Do we know if there's any sort of major investment going on in grassroots facilities to help develop a better class of domestic player? No league can prosper without that.

[Etienne]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

I think the IPL system militates against following individual sides, as the squads are radically different from one season to the next.

I reckon a lot of the kids who wear Madrid and Barcelona jerseys at the moment have very little knowledge or familiarity with Spain. They just know they are the the biggest teams with the best players.

So, I don't think that either of those are insurmountable obstacles.

The issue of the Chinese economy could obviously change things.

[ursus arctos]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

There seems to be very little evidence of that, as Chinese sport administration is still super-focused on Olympic sports, and there are only two medals to win in football (a sport where they have consistently found it difficult to find a foot hold, even on a regional basis).

[Gangster Octopus]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

Etienne wrote: And I still await anyone explaining what possible miscommunication could be brought about by people using 'les' rather than 'fewer'.

Well 'fewer' is an English word pertaining to numbers, whereas 'les' is one of the French words for 'the'...

[My Name Is Ian]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

I've prepping a Chinese Super League thing over the last few days or so. I'm quite interested in the idea of keeping an eye on a league about which I know next to nothing whatsoever and start completely from scratch over. And, of course, China is a fascinating country.

There's plenty to the idea that this could well turn out to be a flash in the pan, though. What UA Says above hints at an end of NASL scenario if things don't go the way they plan, but that would also be interesting, in its own way.

[Etienne]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

Gangster Octopus wrote:

And I still await anyone explaining what possible miscommunication could be brought about by people using 'les' rather than 'fewer'.

Well 'fewer' is an English word pertaining to numbers, whereas 'les' is one of the French words for 'the'...

touche

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

Then again, I've spent a fair bit of the last couple of months reading article after article telling me that the Chinese economy is very close to going tits up in spectacular fashion, with potentially appalling consequences for the western world's economies as well. So . . .

I went to China with Garcia in 2001, and I just remember being struck at how rickety the chinese economic miracle looked. I remember seeing a building housing a huge state bank, and the front of it was this very impressive facade, but if you took a couple of steps to the right, you could see that behind the gleaming facade, was a very rickety looking bare concrete structure, that didn't look very healthy. I believe it may have been called the almost-too-convenient-and-illustrative-to-be-plausible,-this-sounds-like-an-anecdote-from-the-republican-presidential-debates bank. it was however a real building.

We went across the river to the newly constructed Pudong skyscraper city, and the whole fucking thing was completely empty. You could have used the place as a film set it was so utterly empty. Now obviously it's entirely full, because they told companies to fill it.

But I just remember thinking at the time that an awful lot of China's banking system was tied up in a lot of non-performing loans to various inefficient enterprises, and how much of this economic miracle seemed to be tied up in Command Economics, and that was 15 years ago.

like in the picture ursus put up, Someone comes up with a plan to build a fucking huge shopping mall. It gets built, because the state thinks its a good idea. Then people are forced to fill it with shops, it then doesn't matter that there isn't anyone nearby to shop in it.

I've never felt the need to believe any of the official economic statistics that come out of china. They're a totalitarian one-party state obsessed with image and propaganda. Of course they lie about the state of their economy. If things have reached the point where they are having to admit that things aren't going great, then the first question I find myself pondering, is Just how fucking bad are they? And how long have they been this way.

Someone has clearly told all the various oligarchs, who are tied into local communist party networks to get out there and create a fucking huge super league, so everyone winds up watching the Chinese Premier League. So lets see how this all maps out. Unlike reporting economic figures based on a massive infrastructure investment of dubious financial merit, you can actually see how a football league is doing.

It will be interesting to see how far down the road they get with project. Will they take over the world, or will they wind up just getting robbed by Jorge Mendes?

[G-Man]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

Etienne wrote:
(And I still await anyone explaining what possible miscommunication could be brought about by people using 'les' rather than 'fewer'.)

Well, you didn't ask anybody, so I'm not sure what you were waiting for.

Anyway, I worked hard to learn the English language, so I reserve the right to be pedantic about my linguistic bugbears.

[Etienne]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

I've asked on previous occasions (obviously, this being OTF, hotbed of pedantry, it's happened plenty of times).

We all have our linguistic bugbears - I hate people saying "disinterested" when they mean "uninterested" and "refute" when they mean "reject" or "rebut". But in those instances there is a possibility of misunderstanding, which I don't see in the present case.

[ursus arctos]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

Someone has clearly told all the various oligarchs, who are tied into local communist party networks to get out there and create a fucking huge super league, so everyone winds up watching the Chinese Premier League.

I actually don't think this is the case, as the tycoons involved aren't "big" enough. I also think that you would have more geographic balance if the Party was driving it.

[Patrick Thistle]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

How many top international football superstars can you fund by selling steel at a price lower than it cost to produce?

China's economic miracle has the answer.

[evilC]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

A slight tangent, but...

Things you probably wouldn't get away with (as a comedian) today, pt.1

[Borracho]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

Some Chinese outfit has lobbed in a £38 million bid for Dimitri Payet.

[dalliance]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

You never know how much truth there is in these reports, but one of the papers today was suggesting that Payet is demanding a new £120,000 per week contract from West Ham, a rise in £50k a week on the deal he signed just last summer.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

well this is just another example of sugar daddy spending inflating wages for everyone else.

[dalliance]

Chinese League the threat to the European Leagues

I think to be fair that West Ham would be well down the list of culpability when it comes to paying, or potentially paying, way too high salaries for forwards.