Change and Renewal, or Breaking and Entering?
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, along with a piece of paper, in the spring of 2021 quietly disappeared in the long river of history.
These new neutral names have not even made their official debut on the field of play, and have not yet felt the fervent cheers of the home fans, but have coldly appeared on the "death list".
From the data, compared to last year's total of 14 clubs in the three levels of the league quit, this year's figure 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 are the Super League champions for the 2020 season, with the defending champions closing the following year, which is extremely rare in international football.
On the last day of February, Jiangsu issued a shutdown announcement.
Beijing Orange and Fung, formerly known as Beijing Renhe, a team that moved through Shanghai, Shaanxi and Guizhou before finally settling in Beijing, has had its moments of glory in the Asian Champions League and the AFC Cup, despite its wandering ways. Before Evergrande joined the Guangzhou team, the then-named Shaanxi Chanba was once known as "China's Real Madrid" and boasted a packed home stadium.
However, these brilliant, with their closing and faded in the dust of history. Like the gradually forgotten "ten champions" Liaozhu, the scenery of Tianjin Tianhai, the style of distinctive veteran team Yanbian team, and the "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 others involved are gnashing their teeth, while many more are numb from the commonplace, even taking a chance that their 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. By Chen Ji Min, China News Agency
In fact, any rational fan knows that the Chinese Super League, which has entered the post-golden dollar era, will never go back to the days when tens of millions of euros were spent on importing big-name foreign aid and domestic players. As long as there is a stable investor and lineup, the team can continue to survive, is the greatest happiness. The vast majority of teams, at any time, may repeat the mistakes of the defending champions.
This kind of numbness is very terrible. The root cause of this is the club's own operation, the strategic adjustment of shareholders, and the superimposed impact of the economic environment under the epidemic. The most intuitive feeling is the deterioration of the investment environment brought about by the gold dollar soccer, clubs long stretched huge investment is ultimately unsustainable. In the process of the ebb and flow of the golden dollar, perhaps there will be the next team to collapse. Those who were rushed to the sky in the golden dollar era of revelers, will instantly fall all over the body.
Canton Football Club 2019 Financial Report.
The most successful Chinese Super League team in the last decade is Guangzhou, but according to the financial materials disclosed by the club, Guangzhou Football Club lost 576 million yuan in 2013; 483 million yuan in 2014; 953 million yuan in 2015; 812 million yuan in 2016; 987 million yuan in 2017, and as much as 1.8 billion yuan in 2018, and 2019 a loss of $1.9 billion.
Of course, it's not just Guangzhou that is losing huge amounts of money, and the only reason for these alarming figures is because Guangzhou Football Club is listed on the New Third Board, which publishes public financial reports every year. As for the revenue situation of other clubs that were crazy about money in the golden dollar era, it can be imagined.
The influx of money in the golden dollar era created a boom, but did not bring the expected development for Chinese professional soccer clubs. Clubs did not have much successful business development, but instead relied more on investors to transfuse blood, and lost themselves in a piece of false prosperity and drunkenness.
The sub-healthy mode of operation is bound to be impossible to sustain 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 broken, but broken Chinese soccer, 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 operation and other aspects. But now the Chinese soccer is still far away from finding this road, and these distances are composed 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.
However, after entering the Super League, Zhejiang will be forced to change to the Nike uniforms that have been 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 easy to see which one is better or worse, and fans will naturally vote with their wallets.
There have been voices from outside pointing out the lack of purchasing power of Chinese fans. The question is, have the clubs themselves really gone the extra mile in the design and marketing of their fan peripherals and match uniforms? Who would be willing to pay for those unsatisfactory Chinese Super League peripheral products?
Huang Shenghua, the interim CEO of the China Football Professional League, 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 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, 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 node of Chinese players not enough youth, 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.
