A bombshell story has been fermenting in Oriental Sports Daily today, focusing on the behind-the-scenes story of former international soccer player Gao Lin's sale of a mansion for 145 million RMB. The article not only explores players such as Gao Lin who benefited from the era of gold-dollar soccer, but also exposes a group of soccer heroes who have fallen into financial difficulties after the wave of salary restrictions and the collapse of the gold-dollar bubble in the Chinese Super League.
According to Oriental Sports Daily, Zhang Jiaqi, a former Ligue 2 player, earned more than 10 million dollars a year when he joined Evergrande in 2014 at the age of just over 20 years old. However, he did not show outstanding performance at Evergrande and was forced to transfer to several teams and even faced unemployment at one time and had to transform into a net car driver. Similarly, Dalian people team veteran Zhu Ting and goalkeeper Yu Ziqian in the Super League salary limit, also had to face unemployment crisis, forced to drive a network car. The former Shanghai Shenxin player Tian Junjie, at the age of 23, was also forced to embark on the road of driving a net car to support his family due to the team's salary arrears.
The controversy over the incident caused the person in question, Yu Ziqian, to post a counterattack on social media, stating outright that the Oriental Sports Daily's report was purely unfounded: "The media talks nonsense all day long? I'm driving an online car with Zhu Ting? I'm not even a dogfooder, I'm not even a dogfooder. Even a mouthful of dog food has no bottom line? Private message me, uncle will buy you canned food!"
Yu Ziqian, born in 1985, started out in the Dalian Shide youth training camp, was selected for the national youth team, and served as the starting goalkeeper for Dalian Albin from 2010 to 2012.On July 9, 2020, he announced his retirement, ending his 19-year career, and turned to youth training as a goalkeeper coach.
