A lot can be said about today's Chinese Super League, for the just-concluded 2023 season, the net time reached the lowest in the last 5 seasons at 50 minutes and 51 seconds, showing the quality of the league. The average number of goals scored by foreigners also showed a clear downward trend, proving that the level of foreigners in the Premier League is also the worst in recent seasons. Of course, this is only the data of the Chinese Super League itself. If we rank it against other leagues around the world, we'll find that the CSL has more problems, is less healthy, and that our league and music departments are way ahead of the pack in many of the bad stats.
Recently, the Swiss Football Observatory, the world's leading soccer research organization, released several lists, including the stability of clubs in the world's top 48 leagues, and the average age rankings of leagues and clubs. Among them, club stability is the average number of seasons of team players. Shanghai Port and Shandong Taishan ranked first and second. The average playing season reached 5.39 and 5.03 seasons, and world-class giants such as Real Madrid, Bayern and Liverpool also entered the list. It's not that the stability is bad, but this stability highlights the fact that no one wants domestic players from the side. Of course, the most serious problem is not this list, but the list of average age of the league and clubs.
The Chinese Super League is way ahead of the global league average age list, ranking first with an average age of 28.41 years. The league and Saudi Arabia ranked second and third, but the average age is no more than 28 years old, 27.91 and 27.90 years old respectively. Of the five major leagues, only La Liga is in the top 10, while the other four major leagues are ranked 20th. The Chinese Super League has become the oldest league in the world, which is not a good thing, but a very serious problem. There are no young players to replace the veterans and the league's standard will drop as the veterans' health declines.
What's even more frightening is that there is only one overseas player in the national football team, and our national football team relies mainly on Chinese Super League players, which also shows the aging of the national football team. The overall age of the Chinese Super League is high, but not without the "contribution" of individual clubs. In the list of average age of clubs, the Chinese Super League clubs are once again far ahead. Qingdao Hainiu tops the list with 31.48 years old, and is the only team in the world's top 48 leagues with an average age of over 30. Qingdao Hainiu is the oldest club. Another Chinese Super League team in the top 10 is Chengdu Rongcheng with an average age of 29.80 years. Another Asian team is Ulsan Hyundai, ranked sixth at 29.60 years old. Other teams are some European fringe leagues and South American league teams.
I didn't think our league and clubs would top the table the way they did. It's not a good thing for the Premier League and clubs to be so far ahead in both stability and average age. If this aging problem is not solved in time, the league and national team will continue to go downhill, and the future wave of players may not be as good as the current one, leading to getting worse and worse. We must pay attention to developing young players.
