On November 4, the 2023 Chinese Super League came to an end, with Shanghai Port (i.e., Shanghai SIPG) winning the Chinese Super League title again after five years, and Dalian Ren relegated to the Central League along with Shenzhen. However, after the season ended, the biggest mystery of the Chinese Super League has just begun. How many clubs will gain access to the CSL is more up in the air than who will finish relegated. In other words, the real relegation battle comes after the league ends.
Wasn't the CFL popular a few years ago? Why is the music sector having such a hard time now? Industry insiders say that the CFL didn't build a relevant industry chain during the "boom time", but sat on the air, and the debt left behind at that time has become a huge and unsustainable burden for the music sector.
The remuneration system is too unreasonable
Higher wages for whatever you want, not making ends meet.
A soccer club consists of three main parts: the first team, the ladder and the club office. Among them, the biggest part of the expenditure comes from the first team of the team. According to the data released by the famous research organization Sportingintelligence (Sporting Intelligence), the average annual salary of Chinese Super League players in the 2019 season is as high as 1.05 million U.S. dollars (about 7.24 million U.S. dollars), which is the sixth in the world after the five major leagues in Europe.
In the era of massive "money burning", the Chinese Super League clubs are accustomed to giving players super-high wages. Top foreign aiders earn $10 million or $20 million a year; ordinary foreign aiders earn $2 million or $3 million; international domestic helpers earn $8 million to $10 million a year; and ordinary Chinese Super League first-tier domestic helpers earn $5 million a year. Even for a Chinese Super League replacement, an annual salary of one or two million dollars is nothing, and even reserve team players can earn up to 800,000 yuan a year. Zhu Yi, the head of German Transfer Market China, has revealed: "Why do many players over 23 years old still hang around in the reserve team of the Chinese Super League? The reason they don't want to transfer is because of the high salary!"
Why is the salary system of the Chinese Super League so unreasonable? The reason is also very simple, because the operation of the Chinese Super League has never taken into account the income, and how much salary is paid depends on the mood of the boss. In other words, there is no absolute standard for the value of a player. The transfer fees of players are dozens and hundreds of times of their value, and the wages of players naturally go all the way up.
All the players are working emperors, but the employees of the club office are still ordinary workers. For example, the staff in the media department, fan department, business department and video department earn 80,000 to 20,000 dollars a month. Even though everyone in the club gets a victory bonus, they are still treated very differently and the situation is really unreasonable.
In 2020, sporting events around the world are in lockout due to the epidemic, especially soccer. Without matches, professional clubs have no income. Therefore, salary cuts have become the top priority for clubs, especially lowering players' wages.In the spring of 2020, in order to maintain the normal operation of the club, La Liga giants Barcelona directly cut 70% of a team's wages, and even applied to the Spanish government for temporary employment regulations. In the end, Messi, Suarez, Griezmann and other big-name stars had to behave themselves and accept the reality of getting only 30% of their wages during the epidemic. Like Barcelona, the clubs that cut salaries to players also have clubs such as Inter Milan, Juventus and Roma in Serie A. The same is true for clubs such as Manchester United and Arsenal in the English Premier League, which was a common phenomenon in European soccer back in the day.
The Chinese league is in a completely different state. Clubs rely entirely on consortiums to invest and operate, and have little or no "blood-forming" ability of their own. This has led to the fact that managers of Chinese Super League clubs basically have no concept of living within their means. Whether a player can get a high salary in the Chinese Super League depends on the owner's main business. Therefore, the Chinese Super League is a complete "boss league" - the boss has money, the club will be full of vitality; the boss has no money, the club will be dead.
