What's the harm in breaking down and then standing up?
29, the much-anticipated domestic professional 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, with a piece of paper official document, in the spring of 2021 quietly into the river of history.
These new forces have not yet made their official appearance on the field, have not yet experienced the passionate call of the home fans, and then so calmly appeared on the "farewell list".
From the data, compared to last year's total of 14 clubs quit the third level, this year's number dropped to 6, seems to have made some "progress". However, from the perspective of the scale of the withdrawal of clubs, but far more than last year.
Jiangsu were the Super League champions for the 2020 season and the defending champions closed the following year, a rarity in global soccer.
On the last day of February, Jiangsu issued a shutdown announcement.
Beijing Orange and Fung, the former Beijing Renhe, a team that moved through Shanghai, Shaanxi and Guizhou before settling in Beijing, has experienced glorious moments such as making it to the Asian Champions League and winning the AFC Cup, despite its wanderings. Before Evergrande came to Guangzhou, Chanba, then known as Shaanxi Chanba, was once known as "China's Real Madrid" and had a packed home stadium.
However, these memories will fade into the dust of history as they close. Just like the gradually forgotten "ten champions" Liao Football, the scenery of Tianjin Tianhai, the style of the old team Yanbian team, 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 in the pain, while more fans are commonplace, insensitive, and even for the home team is still surviving the fluke.
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 big Guangzhou team becomes only out of the box, 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. By Chen Ji Min, China News Agency
In fact, any rational fan knows clearly that the Chinese Super League, which has entered the post-golden dollar era, can never go back to the era when tens of millions of euros were spent on importing big-name foreign aiders and domestic players. With stable investors and lineups, teams can still survive, which is the greatest happiness. The vast majority of teams, at any time, may repeat the mistakes of the defending champions.
This numbness is terrible. The root cause of this is the impact of the club's own operation, the strategic adjustment of shareholders, and the change of the economic environment under the epidemic, which is superimposed on each other. The most intuitive feeling is the deterioration of the investment environment brought about by the gold dollar soccer, clubs for a long time stretched to the limit type of huge investment is ultimately unsustainable. In the process of the ebbing of the golden dollar, perhaps there will be the next team to collapse. Those who celebrated in the golden dollar era, will fall all over the body in a flash.
Canton Soccer Saloon Fiscal Year 2019.
The most successful Chinese Super League team in the last decade is the Guangzhou team, but according to the financial materials released by the club, in 2013, the Guangzhou Football Salon lost 576 million yuan; in 2014, it lost 483 million yuan; in 2015, it lost 953 million yuan; in 2016, it lost 812 million yuan; in 2017, it lost 987 million yuan, and in 2018, it lost as much as 1.8 billion yuan, and in 2019, it lost 1.9 billion.
Of course, it's not just the Guangzhou team that is losing huge amounts of money, coming up with these shocking figures simply because the Guangzhou Football Salon is listed on the New Third Board, which publishes public financial reports every year. As for the revenue status of other clubs that have been crazy about money in the golden dollar era, it's hard to imagine.
The influx of money during the Golden Dollar era created a prosperous phenomenon, but it did not bring the expected development for Chinese professional soccer clubs. The clubs did not have too many successful commercial developments, 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 is said that not to be broken, but the broken Chinese Super League, really can still stand up?
In an interview a few days ago, Chen Xuyuan, the president of the CFA, said that Chinese soccer needs to find a development path that meets national conditions. This is indeed an urgent problem for Chinese soccer, and this road includes many aspects, such as club business development, youth training, league operations and other aspects. But now Chinese soccer is still a long way from finding this road, and these distances are made up of one detail after another.
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, "the lake in spring like a picture, chaotic peaks around the level of the store", the jersey is also printed on the club's name of all the registered members of the club, the overall sense of aesthetics and rich in connotation.
But after the replacement into the Super League, the Zhejiang team will be forced to change to the Nike version of the uniforms that have been repeatedly criticized by outsiders for being unplanned over the years. When the two versions of the jerseys are placed in front of each other, it is clear which one is better or worse, and fans will naturally vote with their wallets.
There have been voices from outside suggesting that Chinese fans don't have enough purchasing power. The question is, have the clubs themselves really gone the extra mile in the design and marketing of their fan peripherals and matchwear? Who would be willing to pay for the less-than-perfect Chinese Super League peripherals?
Huang Shenghua, the 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 project 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 the way to get rid of the pseudo-professional label, more independent blood, and only in this way, China's professional soccer will have a way out. But in the current Chinese players not enough youth at the node, the lack of ornamental and add a lot of difficulty for this road.
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.
