The first episode of this column focuses on a far place in Asia – China. China Super League (CSL) has recently become a gathering place for many European famous players, including former Newcastle United striker Salomón Rondón and coach Rafael Benitez. After the professionalization of Chinese football infrastructure, CSL is coming more and more mature. Even in the past two years, the attendances of CSL has reached 24100, ranking sixth in the world football league. However, in terms of national team and technical and tactical level, there is still a big gap between Chinese football and football powers. In this issue, we will briefly discuss the current development of Chinese football.
I’m glad to invite Jack Muscutt, a Newcastle fan who used to work as a sports reporter on Estuary TV, to discuss the differences between Chinese football and British football from the perspective of a professional English football reporter. By discussing the differences between the development of Chinese football and British football, we can see whether the advanced British football concept and experience has the opportunity to help the development of Chinese football.
- Tradition – Much more longer history of professional football.
We can easily see some footballer as a idol of England teenagers. But it is very hard to find someone to be an idol in Chinese football. The professionalization of CSL was officially completed in 1994, more than hundreds years later than that of the UK.
“When I was a kid, Alan Shearer is my favorite player, I really upset when he stop player and I have a Newcastle shirt with Shearer on the back.”
2. Competitive – China need more teams to catch up with the top
From 2011, Guangzhou Evergrande began to monopolize the champion of CSL for seven years. During the Evergrande Dynasty, they won the Asian Champions League twice and participated in the World Club Cup. But we see many team can’t keep up with that investment. This is not necessarily good for the development of the whole league. During Evergrande’s victory, many old teams with less investment were demoted and disbanded. The emergence of “super teams” has reduced the competitiveness of the league and also made many sponsors of small teams leave the football market.
“One thing I say about Chinese League is that it need more teams to have the chance to win the league, otherwise it get boring.”
On the contrary, being always competitive is a feature of the Premier League. In the past decade, Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City have won the Premier League title successively, and this year Liverpool are also approaching the title. Premier League champions usually don’t monopolize because of a sudden big investment of a team. Instead, they need a long time to accumulate. This makes the League more healthy.
3. Passion – The passion of the fans are not enough
The attendance of CSL ranked sixth in the global ranking. But when we look at the data of the fans of CSL, we will find that there are two characteristics. Firstly, the teams with high attendance and low attendance are far from each other. Guangzhou Evergrande, which ranks first in the attendance rate, has 45975 people per game, while Beijing Renhe with 8102 are the last in the attendance rate. Take the ticket price of 10 yuan per game as an example. Such a gap will make Guangzhou Evergrande earn 5.8 million yuan more than Beijing Renhe in a season. And the Beijing man and also relegated after the end of the season and until today have the possibility of disbanding the team. In addition, the number of people on the team is usually far from the capacity of the stadium. We can see that even Bournemouth, who has the lowest attendance in the Premier League, has a full attendance rate of 92.4% per game. While Beijing people and even though there are more than 8000 people on average, their full occupancy rate is only 26%.
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