Unbreakable: changes and challenges in the soccer league
At the border of change and heritage, a change about soccer quietly staged. 29, the much-anticipated domestic work soccer league access list finally settled.
Jiangsu team, Beijing Orange and Fung, Taizhou Yuanda, Inner Mongolia Zhongyou ...... a string of both familiar and unfamiliar names, accompanied by an official letter, quietly bid farewell to history in the spring of 2021.
The neutral names of these new salons have not yet made their official debut on the field, have not shone in the cheers of the home fans, but are already destined to become a member of the "list of the dead".
Compared to last year's withdrawal of 14 salons from the third tier, this year's number dropped to six, which seems to be an "improvement". However, in terms of the magnitude of teams exiting, it is much higher than last year.
Jiangsu, the 2020 Chinese Super League (CSL) champions, became a rare sensation in world soccer when the defending champions closed in disgrace the following year.
On the last day of February, Jiangsu made an announcement about suspending operations.
And Beijing Orange and Fung, also known as the former Beijing Renhe, a team that had bounced around Shanghai, Shaanxi, Guizhou, and finally settled in Beijing, despite drifting all the way around, has had its moments of glory when it stormed into the Asian Championship and won the AFC Cup.
However, these glories are now in the past, fading into the dust of history as the closing them.
14+6, in just two years, as many as 20 working soccer saloons have disappeared into history.
While Jiangsu fans, Tianjin fans and others involved gnash their teeth, more fans are used to it and even take a chance on the home team surviving.
Even fans of the top teams in the Chinese Super League have become "Buddhist". Previously unimaginable Guangzhou team, in the transfer market has become only out not in, but the outside world has little blame.
Guangzhou won the eighth Chinese Super League (CSL) trophy in the team's history in the 2019 season.
However, into the post-golden yuan era of the Chinese Super League, can never go back to the era of tens of millions of euros at every turn to introduce big-name foreign aid and domestic players.
Having a stable investor and roster, and the team's continued survival is the greatest good. The vast majority of teams, at any moment, could repeat the mistakes of the defending champions.
This numbness is worrying. The reasons for this are mainly the overlapping effects of the salon's own operations, the strategic realignment of shareholders, and the changing economic environment under the epidemic.
Golden dollar soccer brought about by the deterioration of the investment environment, the salon for a long time stretched huge investment is ultimately unsustainable.
Guangzhou Soccer Salon's 2019 financial report shows that it has accumulated billions of dollars in losses over the past decade.
Of course, the huge loss is not only the Guangzhou team, other golden dollar era crazy money salon revenue situation can also be imagined.
The influx of money in the golden dollar era created a red-hot phenomenon, but did not bring the expected development of China's working soccer salons.
Lacking successful business development, the salons are instead more dependent on investors for blood transfusions and have lost themselves in a sea of false prosperity and drunkenness.
Sub-healthy form of operation is definitely not sustainable in the long run, and now, the node of the bursting of the gold dollar bubble has arrived unannounced, and the ensuing sense of pain has suffocated many people.
It's been said that if you don't break it, you can't build it, but can a broken CFL ball really still stand up?
In an interview a few days ago, Chen Xuyuan, chairman of the Chinese Super League Association, said that Chinese Super League football needs to find a development path that meets national conditions.
This path encompasses many aspects, such as salon business development, youth training, and league operations.
However, the current Super League ball is still a long way from finding that path, and those distances are made up of one detail at a time.
For example, before the release of the Zhejiang team's new season in the first jersey, the overall design inspiration taken from Bai Juyi's spring title on the lake, "spring on the lake seems to be a picture, chaotic peaks around the level of the pavement," the jersey is also printed with the names of all registered members of the Salon, the overall aesthetic sense of the whole and has a connotation.
However, after the replacement into the Super League, Zhejiang team will be forced to change to those years by the outside world repeatedly spat no planning Nike version of the uniform.
When the two versions of the jersey are put in front of each other, it's clear which is better or worse, and fans will naturally vote with their wallets.
There have been voices outside pointing out the lack of purchasing power of our fans, the problem is that the salon itself, fan peripherals and match uniforms, really in the planning, marketing aspects of the heart? Who would be willing to pay for those unsatisfactory Chinese Super League peripheral products?
Huang Shenghua, the interim CEO of the Chinese Super League Working Alliance, said that the new season of the Chinese Super League in Guangzhou is expected to drive 1 billion GDP.
As a soccer program with a large audience base, it has considerable potential for economic benefits.
Next season, the Chinese Super League will expand to 18 teams, according to the 2019 season 23,300 average number of spectators on the field to calculate, if the full restoration of home and away, then there will be 7,038,000 people walk into the stadium to watch the game, will be in the ticket, the team around, food and beverage, travel and many other aspects of the huge economic benefits.
And according to the statistics of the 2020 season of the Chinese Super League viewing data, the Chinese Super League attracted a total of 389 million TV viewers, and the cumulative number of TV viewers was 1.65 billion.
Overall, the audience base of the Chinese Super League is not small, just how to stimulate this collective spending power, for the league and the salon to bring economic benefits, which requires practitioners more wisdom, but also need to be more dedicated to provide fans with better service and viewing experience.
As a work soccer league, this is all the way to take off the pseudo-work label, more independent blood production, and only in this way, China's work soccer will have a way out.
But at the point where our players are now green and yellow, the lack of spectacle adds to the difficulty of this path.
Hopefully, the surviving work teams and practitioners this year will be strong enough to get through this period of pain and find that forward trajectory that suits CFL ball sooner rather than later.
