On March 29, 2021, the Chinese Football Association (CFA) unveiled the entry list for the new season, announcing that Jiangsu Football Club (GFC), which had just won the Chinese Super League (CSL) title, would be withdrawing from the professional league. In the blink of an eye, the year 2021 has come to an end with only three months left, and Guangzhou Football Club, the eight-time champion of the Chinese Super League and two-time AFC Champions League winner, has suffered an unprecedented crisis. After the official announcement of the early termination of the contract with head coach Carnavaro, whether Guangzhou can finish the remaining matches of this season, when the player transfer market will open, and whether the team will follow the footsteps of Tianjin Teda, the struggling Evergrande Group holds the key to the survival and future of the Guangzhou team.
With the Guangzhou team player market set to open, is the FA's move another godsend?
Early in the morning of September 27, a piece of news about the Chinese Football Association (CFA) spread rapidly on the Internet. The message was about an additional note on the banning protocol for the main phase of the 2021 Chinese Super League Soccer Association Cup. The note relates to the creation of an additional temporary transfer window for clubs that need to complete transfers, leases and FA Cup supplementary entries due to national team call-ups. The document release date shows that the note was issued on September 15th.
According to this latest rule, Guangzhou currently has eight players, including Eckerson and Wei Shihao, called up by the national team, which means the team can accordingly add players to compete in this year's AFC Cup. However, given Guangzhou's current predicament, instead of seeking reinforcements, they need to (rent) sell players for money. Therefore, once this new rule was released, fans speculated that this seemed to be a "sell-only" market tailor-made for the Evergrande Group, and that a seemingly disbanded soccer club was preparing to start a capital recovery operation.
With the ownership of the 100,000-seat professional soccer stadium transferred to the Guangzhou Urban Investment Group, it seems logical that it is only a matter of time before the player market for the Guangzhou team closes. As a result, since the negative news from Evergrande, the media has been worried about the Guangzhou team, with most of the team's players having been prematurely "assigned" to other Chinese Super League clubs.
