Soccer's Big Change: From Glory to Doldrums in a Rotation
Broken and then established, established and then broken?
On the 29th, the dust settled on the highly anticipated entry list for the domestic professional soccer league.
Jiangsu team, Beijing Orange and Fung, Taizhou Yuanda, Inner Mongolia Zhongyou ...... a string of familiar and unfamiliar names, accompanied by an official letter, disappeared into the long river of history in the spring of 2021.
These newborn club neutral names have not yet made their official debut on the field, have not yet experienced the cheers of the home fans, but have coldly appeared on the "death list".
In terms of numbers, compared to last year's 14 clubs in the third tier, this year's number dropped to six, which seems to be an "improvement". But in terms of the magnitude of clubs that have quit, it is much higher than last year.
Jiangsu was the Super League champion for the 2020 season, and the defending champion closed the following year, which is extremely rare in international soccer.
On the last day of February, Jiangsu issued a shutdown announcement.
As for Beijing Orange and Fung, the previous Beijing Renhe, the team that had bounced around Shanghai, Shaanxi and Guizhou before finally settling in Beijing, despite drifting all the way around, had its high moments of storming into the Asian Champions League and winning the AFC Cup.
Before Evergrande joined Guangzhou, Shaanxi Chanba, then known as Chanba, was once known as "China's Real Madrid" and had a devilish home stadium that was packed to the rafters.
However, these brilliant memories will fade into the dust of history as they close. Like the gradually forgotten "ten champions" Liaozhu, the scenery of Tianjin Tianhai, the style of the old team Yanbian obvious, and "eight champions" Dalian Shide ......
14+6, in just two years, as many as 20 professional soccer clubs have disappeared. So much so that now, Jiangsu fans, Tianjin fans and other parties involved are gnashing their teeth, while more fans are just numb to the commonplace, or even lucky that the home team is still alive.
Even the fans of the top teams in the Chinese Super League have become very "Buddhist". In the past, it is hard to imagine, every year in the transfer market to buy the big players in the Guangzhou team became only out of not in, the outside world did not set off too much blame sound......
Guangzhou won the eighth Chinese Super League (CSL) trophy in the team's history in the 2019 season.
In fact, rational fans are well aware that the Chinese Super League into the post-golden yuan era, can never go back to the era of tens of millions of euros at every turn to introduce big-name foreign aid, domestic players.
The greatest blessing is to have a stable investor and roster, and for the team to continue to survive. The vast majority of teams, at any moment, could repeat the mistakes of the defending champions.
This kind of numbness is very scary. The root cause of this is mainly the impact of the club's own operations, the strategic adjustments of shareholders, and the overlapping effects of the changing economic environment under the epidemic.
The most intuitive feeling is the deterioration of the investment environment brought about by the golden dollar soccer, the clubs have been stretched to the limit for a long time to invest huge sums of money is ultimately unsustainable.
As the gold dollar ebbs, perhaps the next team will be heading for a collapse.
Those revelers who were swept up in the golden age will fall on their asses in a flash.
Canton Soccer Saloon Fiscal Year 2019.
The most successful Chinese Super League team in the past decade is the Guangzhou team, but according to the club's disclosure of financial materials, in 2013, the Guangzhou soccer salon lost 576 million yuan; in 2014, a loss of 483 million yuan; in 2015, a loss of 953 million yuan; in 2016, a loss of 812 million yuan; in 2017, a loss of 987 million yuan, a loss of as much as 1.8 billion yuan in 2018, and in 2019, a loss of 1.9 billion.
Of course, the huge losses are not only the Guangzhou team, come up with these shocking figures, simply because the Guangzhou Football Salon is listed on the New Third Board, there will be a public financial report released every year.
As for what the revenue situation is like for other clubs that went on a money-spinning spree during the golden dollar years, one can only imagine.
The influx of money during the golden dollar era created a boom, but it did not bring the expected development for Chinese professional soccer clubs. The clubs did not have much successful business development, but instead relied more on blood transfusion from investors and lost themselves in a false prosperity and drunkenness.
Sub-healthy mode of operation is by no means 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 paroxysm has suffocated many people.
It's said that if you don't break it, you can't stand it, but can a broken Chinese Super League really still stand?
In an interview a few days ago, Chen Xuyuan, president of the Chinese Football Association (CFA), said that Chinese soccer needs to find a development path that meets the country's conditions.
This is indeed an urgent problem for Chinese soccer, and the road contains many aspects, such as club business development, youth training, league operations and other aspects.
But Chinese soccer 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 on the club's name of all the registered members of the club, the overall aesthetic sense of the whole and has the connotation of the.
But after the replacement into the Super League, Zhejiang team will be forced to change to these years by the outside world many times spit no planning Nike version of the uniform.
When the two versions of the jersey are put in front of you, it's clear at a glance which is better or worse, and fans will naturally vote with their wallets.
There have always been voices from the outside saying that the purchasing power of Chinese fans is insufficient, the question is the clubs themselves, fan peripherals and match uniforms, really in the planning and marketing aspects of the heart? Who would be willing to pay for those unsatisfactory Chinese Super League peripheral products?
Huang Shenghua, interim CEO of the China Football Work Alliance, said in a previous interview 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 does have a lot of potential in terms of economic benefits.
Next season, the Chinese Super League will expand to 18 teams, according to the 2019 season 23,300 average number of spectators to calculate, if the full restoration of home and away, then there will be 7,038,000 people into the stadium to watch the game, will be in the ticket, the team around, food and beverage, travel and so on many 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, China's soccer audience base is not small, just how to stimulate the spending power of this group, for the league and clubs 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 professional soccer league, this is all a necessary way to get rid of the pseudo-professional label and become more independent of blood production, and only in this way will there be a way out for Chinese professional soccer.
However, at the point where Chinese players are now not enough youth, the lack of spectacle adds to the difficulty of this path.
I hope that this year's surviving work teams and practitioners will be strong enough to get through this period of pain and find that forward trajectory suitable for Chinese soccer as soon as possible.
