Photo by Tsutomu Takasu (tpower1978) used under Creative Commons 2.0

FC Barcelona, the club who plays the most beautiful football in the world, is building its success in China, and they’re approaching the market in a way that no other club has done before.

Last month, Sandro Rosell, Barça’s new president, was traveling in China with his colleagues. Unlike others, their trip was not about friendly games or cooperation with local clubs, but laying down guanxi with Chinese politicians and clenching a business deal with a giant Internet firm.

Few other club is doing what Barça’s doing, which may help them working with the Chinese government rather than merely a local club, and reaching out to Chinese fans like they owe them.

Their fierce rival, Read Madrid, is the only club who plans to provide help to a football academy soon to be launched by a local club. Among all the elites, only Liverpool FC is officially engaging the fans here on Chinese micro-blogging platform on their own, a strategy only began this July, as most clubs accounts are still managed by Chinese media and fan groups.

During their stay, Mr.Rosell met the heads of the Ministry of Education in Beijing, municipal officials in Shanghai, who are in need of their help in developing its local football structure.

If one stop could best highlight their China visit, the Barça delegation spent a night at a fundraiser hosted by China Foundation for Disabled Persons, which run under the leadership of Deng Pufang, the first son of Deng Xiaoping, the former paramount leader of China. And Liu Yandong, China’s State Councilor and the only female Politburo member, serves as an honorary director of the foundation.

Yet there’s something more than fundraising to both parties, as Ms.Liu is officially the woman behind the reshuffle of Chinese football and for several times declared her interest in building up the football structure at ground-level through education, which they may seek Barça’s assistance with their La Masia model, the club’s famed football academy.

Since Xi Jinping, China’s hair-apparent, declared his high hopes for Chinese football in 2009, Liu assumed the governing role in the State Council’s ‘football investigation and research group’ to solve the puzzle of the sport.

But football further tumbled in the country. This June, the Chinese national men’s U-23 team failed to get a ticket to the London Olympics and, as if it’s not enough, the national team was disqualified from the 2014 World Cup in October.

The situation is very likely to continue. According to the Chinese Football Association, there’s only about 3,000 registered players nationwide under the age of 19. The number of football academies has been dwindling. Liaoning province, once a football powerhouse that had 21 academies ten years ago, now has none.

“If we have to do something with China, it’s better to do with the authorities,” said Laurent Colette, Barça’s chief marketing officer, in their meeting with the heads of Ministry of Education, adding it’s possible that the clubs may open academies in China, like they did in Japan and Korea.

“I think it’s a positive message coming from the central government,” said Xia Haifeng, chairman of Inter Sports, a state-owned firm founded by the Beijing government, and the exact company who arranged Barça’s China visit. “It’s good to talk about education rather than gold medals.”

Inter Sports was founded in 2005 under the mission of “importing major International competitions to the ‘Bird’s Nest’ and ‘Water Cube’”, architectural emblems of the Beijing Olympics invested by the Beijing government.

“When you talk with Inter Sports, you talk with authorities in Beijing and Shanghai. For us it’s perfect,” said Laurent.

Barça’s revenue last year hit 460 mln euros, in which only less than one percent come from the Chinese market, despite the country holds 30 percent of its fans worldwide, according to the club’s own market research numbers.

These 30 percent are nowhere to be found on Facebook or Twitter, as the two social-networking services are still blocked by the Chinese authorities.

But fans here have their own ways to follow their football heroes. On Tencent Weibo, a popular micro-blogging platform, Lionel Messi has over 14 million followers, seven times the size of Barça’s official account on Twitter.

The club signed an agreement with Tencent, which makes available the company’s 900 millon QQ users within reach, a deal that was “very satisfied” by Didac Lee, Barça’s director of new technology, who noted that the club plans to sell smart-phone apps to its Chinese fans in the future, a move that no other club ventured.

“The Internet is the best way for us to be 24-7 in China. Summer tours make a lot of money on a few days, but it’s not the best way to make loyal supporters,” said Didac.

“It’s like working out in a gym here,” Laurent stretches his arms. “First you open your arms to expand your fan base, to be sure that you reach all the possible fans here through TV, Internet, press and so on. Then to monetize, which is to create a financial link to transfer your fans into business.”

“It’s Barça 2.0 in China now”, said Xia Haifeng, who arranged the club’s friendly game in China last year in the ‘Bird’s Nest’. “Football fans here take a lot less interest in friendlies than they did before.”

“We did that in the past and don’t like that,” said Laurent. “Summer tours should be only a part of what we do here. We’ll reach the fans by 360 degree marketing to make sure this snowballing effect cast the football followers with contact and information about us, and little by little they have more reasons to become our fans.”

“Our plan in China is not to come, take the money and run,”said Mr.Rosell to TV3, a Catalan broadcaster,. “It’s, first of all, to know what and how we can offer to them, making as many Barça supporters as possible. In the long term, our goal is to monetize from those supporters.”

Just like the way they behave in the transfer market, the Catalans are clear and patient about what they should do.

“We’re not going to get crazy about China, ”said Xavier Faus, the club’s vice president, when speaking about the broadcasting time in La Liga, as the team usually plays in the early morning around 3am in Beijing time. “We cannot, in order to gain 1m euro here, lose 5m in our own market.”

Barça plans to host its first summer camp next summer in Beijing, but they may not be able to offer remedy as the government intended for the demise of Chinese soccer.

“We’re not here to solve the Chinese problem,” confessed Laurent. “Many people told us the Chinese results are bad. I’m a French and French results are bad as well. Don’t worry, there’re cycles.”

Chinese football hit a new low on June 23 as the national U-23 squad were beaten 1-3 in Muscat by their Omanian peers and lost 1-4 on aggregate in 2012 London Olympic Games qualifiers. The defeat marks not only the most short-lived U-23 team in the history of Chinese football, but also could make Miroslav Blažević, the acclaimed Croat coach, the most short-serving national team manager since the Communist Revolution after only two competitive matches of coaching.

Chinese U-23 Team Lost in Muscat, Oman

Commentators, pundits and fans voiced their upset and anger on Chinese micro-blogging sites towards the Iranian Mohsen Torky and his linesmen, whose refereeing could be called into question on several occasions, most notably China’s goal called offside in the 93-minute. Miroslav Blažević reportedly called the referee a pickpocket when the team arrived back to their hotel. And almost as always, following Chinese teams’ defeats, the Chinese FA (CFA) was immediately criticized as corrupt and defunct.

With the likes of Nan Yong and Yang Yimin toppled in last year’s crackdown, the CFA formed its new leadership headed by Wei Di, former boss of China’s aquatic sports. Wei and his colleagues, as our ultimate Guo’an supporter B.Cheng noted in a post earlier, made a couple dubious calls leading up to U-23′s failure. But in the 18 months since Wei stepped in, he and his colleagues actually accomplished several things that should be given credit to.

The CFA’s recent accomplishments:

• Ending the ridiculous transfer policy that made players immovable up to 30 months (I’ll explain more about this in a separate post).
• Bringing back the reserve leagues – the attendance is not compulsory for all teams in the leagues as some clubs say they don’t have a budget for players’ traveling cost.
• Bringing back the FA Cup – a tournament seized to exist since 2006.
• Setting up National Youth Football Leagues (青少年足球联赛) -teams competing in this category are still mainly from pro clubs.
• Setting up School Football Test Cities (校园足球城市试点), a project initiated by a few politicians from the State Council, China’s cabinet, and jointly helped by the General Administration of Sport and the Ministry of Education. The CFA has a small office and a handful of people doing the fieldwork and, up until now, there’re  over 2,700 elementary and junior highs in 47 cities around the country signed aboard.

None of these works can offer short-term return to Chinese football, but all are positive for the development of the sport in the long run.  I’m especially amazed by the Test Cities project but if you really think about it, those kids in over 2,700 schools, an enormous players base, a new question emerged – how are you going to engage these boys 10 years from now?

The top priority on the FA’s agenda should be shedding their image as a bunch of officials who sit in their offices all day doing nothing but taking bribes and rigging matches. And if you have this image ingrained in people’s minds, I really don’t see many parents would consider football as a decent option for their kids. In fact, due to the former transfer policy and a lack of an independent players association, the welfare of Chinese footballers have been sandwiched by the FA and their employers all these years.

Take, for example, two Guangzhou Evergrande (广州恒大) players in the reverse team. The two blasted out their discontent about salaries on a micro-blogging site this May, and were fired the day after doing that. This, if put in perspective, is a dictating and irresponsible act from one of the weathest and most influential clubs in Chinese Super League. I wonder where could the two kids go and what other clubs might think after the incident. The FA offered no help to the two boys and didn’t say anything about the case. What they should do is let the players in the leagues feel they are valued and got their back given there is no players union.

The football population has been decreasing sharply all around China in the past decade. According to Shenzhen Evening News, there were 21 privately-run football academies that had 1,290 kids studying and over 70 football clubs with over 5,000 kids back in 2002 in Liaoning Province. The number of registered football academies this year is down to zero.

The hopes remains only if the FA conjures up a way of selecting the best talents from around the country. To achieve that, they need to a) establish a mechanism that can transfer new blood up through the ranks all the way from schools to pro clubs and b) let potential pro players feel that they have a future in this profession. Otherwise, we can expect Chinese football to tumble further.

Photo: Netease

The eternal rivalry comes to Beijing

Inter Milan’s 3-1 victory over Serie A counterpart Palermo has filled the final spot for the other participant in this summer’s Italian Super Cup, which will be returning to Beijing. This year’s curtain-raiser to the 2011/12 Serie A season is going to be a treat for Chinese supporters of Italian football as this season’s champion AC Milan will take on their eternal rivals for the first time on the Asian continent.

The Milan derby has always been one of the most highly charged and most anticipated matches on the Serie A schedule. The history between the two Italian giants reads like a movie with action, drama, comedy and suspense all rolled into one. If Halley’s Comet is only visible from earth every 75 years, then Chinese supporters will be in for a treat this summer for this is one of the rarest events to occur outside of Italy.

While football fans in China maybe foaming at the mouth to see their heroes such as Brazilian international Pato and midfield enforcer Gennaro Gattuso do battle against Dutch international Wesley Sneijder and Cameroonian international Samuel Eto’o, officials at the China Football Association and those with the task of organizing this event have to be very concerned about one thing: how to prevent the rampant scalping of tickets for this match.

Gattuso and Sneijder

When the final whistle blew in Rome, every ticket scalpers dream came true. There probably has not been this much excitement for a sporting event since the 2008 Olympic Games. Nearly three years ago, ticket scalping was at a fever pitch from the opening ceremony and selected events around Beijing.

Being one in the mass of people who went to see the United States in the men’s basketball competition at Wukesong, I was met by throngs of scalpers at the subway entrance just looking to sell me a ticket. Perhaps there were even a few who wanted to buy my ticket in order to sell it for a higher price later.

Now, ticket prices for the Italian Super Cup range from 200RMB up to 4,000RMB. According to the organizers over half of the tickets will be under 1,000RMB. It is needless to say that tickets for this once in a lifetime event will sell out, however, how much will scalpers be able to make off with after re-selling the tickets later? Also, have organizers come up with any measures to make sure that tickets are only being sold to those who want to see the two Italian giants clash?

Just this week a new policy was implemented which requires passengers on China’s high speed trains to show identification in order to purchase a ticket. The objective is to prevent ticket scalping, which has been a serious problem for the railway system, especially during the Spring Festival period when hordes of people make their long treks back home.

Perhaps this could work for major sporting events that come to China. You get the true football fans in the stadium on match day with a ticket with their name on it. Anyone else holding the ticket with hopes of entering gets questioned. It also prevents the scalper from re-selling the ticket for higher than its face value.

However, this could also be a turn off for some people as going through the process of showing their identification to buy a ticket could be an inconvenience. Also, the ticket could be deemed worthless if they are not able to go to the match in the end. Would they be able to refund the ticket?

Organizers can expect to make a profit from this year’s cup tie between AC Milan and Inter. However, if there are no measures taken to prevent ticket scalping, the true winners will be the scalpers themselves.

During the 30 minutes interval at Shenyang Tiexi Stadium, supporters of Liaoning and Beijing Guo’an found out they didn’t really like each other, and had a fight after the match.

Second, according to Yangtze Evening News, a Nanjing paper, penis size is now a barometer in selecting young players at Tianjin Locomotive Football Club. Looking at a boy’s penis size and shape can give you an idea of his hormone level, revealed a senior staffer of the club. Boys with short, thick genitals and tight scrotum are good for football playing. 囧

When Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger visited Beijing last summer, there was one question in his mind. At a press conference, he asked the moderator, Huang Jianxiang, a well-known local football commentator, why China, with so many people, lacked a first-rate football team.

The question was laughed off by the commentator, who replied that it was because “We never had a coach like you.”

But coaching isn’t the core problem in Chinese football. The recent crackdown on match-fixing and underground gambling tells one that the beautiful game has rotten to the core in China.

In the past three months, more than 100 players, club owners and officials have been entangled in the investigation and last week both Nan Yong, vice president of the Chinese Football Association (FA) and Yang Yimin, a senior official in both the FA and the Asian Football Confederation, along with Zhang Jianqiang, FA’s head of referees, were detained by the police for interrogation.

Without waiting for formal charges, the three, who had each served in the FA for over 18 years, were soon ousted by the General Administration of Sport (GAS), the top governing body of sports in the country.

The news came as little surprise to many Chinese sports journalists. Instead of assuming their role as watchdogs by exposing wrongdoing in the sporting industry, they are now reveling in their knowledge of match-fixing scandals.

They’re making appearances in talk shows or shilling new books, enlightening the public about the severity of the scandals and how there’re still “big fishes” out there to be caught. But rarely did these stories that they supposedly knew all along make the headlines of their papers or TV programs.

At the end of 2007, CCTV-5, China’s main sports channel, did a program evaluating the work done by Xie Yalong, then FA president. After the program gave Xie low marks, the FA began snubbing interview requests from journalists representing the channel. The message from officials couldn’t have been clearer, and the media, eager to keep their access, understood it well.

Besides media indifference, the absence of law enforcement and tacit condoning of corruption by GAS are all causes of the ignominious practices in football. Evidence suggests that bribery and match-fixing prevail in the Chinese sporting world.

The current investigation in football was made possible only after top government officials decided that they wanted to “raise the level of Chinese football.” What is happening in football industry could well mirror other aspects of Chinese sport.

Last year, after Ma Yanping, an acclaimed diving coach, exposed that the finals of diving competition of last year’s 11th National Games had been rigged by Zhou Jihong, head of China’s national diving team and deputy director of the National Aquatics Sport Administration Center, officials from GAS soon came into Zhou’s defense. The police were nowhere to be seen.

Asked about the scandal by a reporter, Zhou, who helped China get 7 out of 8 gold medals with her strikingly young-looking diving team at the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, retorted, “Which media organization do you work for?”

When addressing the same topic, Xiao Tian, deputy director of GAS said at a press conference that “you can’t say it had been fucking fixed, it’s fucking fake, just because you lost.”

In a post-match interview at the 11th National Games, He Wenna, China’s first trampoline Olympic champion, said that she knew who would win the finals long ago. There was no follow-up investigation and He was later criticized at a GAS meeting for her words.

The same happened at the judo, basketball and football matches of the National Games.

More recently, in the run-up to 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games and Asian Para Games, members of the Guangzhou People’s Congress Standing Committee complained about a lack of information from the organizing committee on the sources and destinations of the funds for the two Games.

It’s reported that the Games cost 200 billion yuan ($29.28 billion) but no official figures have been released so far. Some worry that the lack of information on such a scale of government spending has already led to waste and embezzlement of taxpayers’ money.

It’s interesting to see how this heavy-handed investigation in football will play out, as the results might even shock those who started it.

Sport has long been regarded as a source of national pride in China. But when pride conflicts with laws and ethics and you hesitate, even for a moment, the battle against corruption is already lost.

Related reading:

• CS Moniter: Is China finally tackling its soccer corruption scourge?
• South China Morning Post: Another day, another raft of soccer scandals (subscription req’ed)
• Gongti Legends: Is it all worth it?
• Global Times: Fair play is sadly missing from Chinese sporting world

Unsettled 'bad boy' Mao celebrates his last-minute equalizer to give Shanghai Shenhua a 1:1 draw against Qingdao on May 20.

I was overly optimistic towards the future of Chinese football players. Though this year saw a few of them found jobs outside the country, almost all footballers still find their rights trampled by the country’s backward transfer rules.

As the transfer window reopened by Chinese FA on June 25, 121 players from 29 football clubs have been transfer listed and 13 others are listed as available for loan. A majority of them, if not all, are fringe players who haven’t played first-team football for a long time.

China has 42 incipient professional football clubs. Each team, according to CFA, can only sign three Chinese players during the month-long transfer period till July 24. Of the 134 players on the transfer/loan list, together 93 of them are from Chinese Super League and Jia League, China’s top- and second- tier leagues, a trend of offloading players by these clubs. To most of the players, chances of transferring to teams in the two leagues are, if any, very low.

According to CFA’s transfer rules, there’re option preferences a player can state in his transfer request: Super League, Jia League, Yi League (third-tier) or any of them. Of the 134 players, 112 stated that they’re willing to play for any club, a desperation to continue their careers elsewhere.

“It goes without saying that a lot of the listed players will lose jobs after this season,” Han Xu, former captain of Beijing Guo’an FC, told China Sports Review. Han, 35, now works as the manager of a sportswear store at the Worker’s Stadium. “The transfer rules were a product of the past and look out of place now,” said Han.

To avoid an exodus of good players to rich clubs, transfer rules was established by CFA and was put into use since 1998. Different from FIFA’s current Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players, it stipulates a player needs to wait 30 months after his contract runs out at a club to become a free agent, a period of time spanning across three seasons. Anyone failed to do so will not be able to get registered at any other club. To most of Chinese players like Han, their careers have been tied to a club from the beginning to the retirement.

The transfer rules have given unbridled power to football clubs. Up until now, most of the players like Han have signed their season-long contracts once a year. If a player hands in a transfer request to his club and the club wants to keep him. Chances are he can still be transfer listed, but the sky-high price tag will only keep interested buyers away. Thus the player is saved, or, to put it in another way, caged. No one would be stupid enough to wait three seasons at home to become a free agent. How many three seasons does a player have in his career?

“I hope the transfer rules can be changed,” said Xiao Zhanbo, a 35-year-old veteran from Shanghai Shenhua FC in an interview with a Beijing newspaper. “If it continues like this, there will be less and less players in this country where footballers are already in short supply. It’s catastrophic for Chinese football in the long run.”

Xiao, once a regular player in China set-up, is now pursued by a Liaoning-based club in Jia League, but the RMB 4 million transfer fee that Shanghai asked was way more than enough to scare away the interested buyer.

“There’s no free transfer in China and a lot of players had no choice but to retire at an early age. How pathetic it is!” confessed Xiao, who has reportedly argued with the club management over a sum of unpaid bonuses last season. The tough and tenacious north-easterner seemed to have reached a compromise later with his boss, being listed as available for loan on June 25.

Mao Jianqing, Xiao’s teammate, has been having a hard time recently. The 22-year-old promising winger appears to have a drinking problem, and was punished to train with the reverse team by Zhu Jun, the club owner. Zhu is now looking to offload the “bad boy” by a whopping RMB 8 million.

“Which Chinese club would pay 8 million yuan for a player like me? It can’t be a final price,” Mao told Beijing TV as Guo’an, a CSL team in China’s capital, is said to have interest in signing him. “I hope to play for a big club if things work out well. But the club may not let me go to Beijing if I said too much.”

Mao had a point here. Thanks to the decade-old transfer rules, a Chinese football club can, in effect, decide everything about its players. And if you play bad boy with the big bosses, feel free to count your days on the chopping block.

China’s FA promised to obey FIFA’s transfer regulations early this year over Zhou Haibin’s case, yet clearly they’re not ready to put their words into action in its backyard, taking all the transfers in the country as domestic affairs.

Previously:

• Go West! Chinese Footballers Now Can Transfer, Finally
• Pirelli Signs Three-year Sponsorship Deal with Chinese Super League
• Zheng Zhi to Play in The Premiership?

Links and Sources :

• CFA’s Transfer Rules (in Chinese via Netease)
• Liaoning Daily: CSL transfer window reopens (in Chinese via China Interactive Sports)
• Jianghua Times’s interview with Xiao Zhanbo (in Chinese via Titan Sports)
• Gongti Legends: Guoan Making Run at Mao Jianqing
• BTV’s interview with Mao Jianqing (in Chinese via Sina)

Photo:  Sohu

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Internazionale players wearing "Pirelli" in Chinese on their jerseys

Italian tyre maker Pirelli becomes the new CSL title sponsor this Friday after signing a three-year sponsorship deal with Chinese Football Association. “We’re satisfied with Pirelli’s offer and their brand will help boost CSL’s image,” said Zhang Lu, vice president of Beijing Guo’an club, who helped facilitate the deal. The deal was reportedly worth 5 million euros (US $ 6.78 million) yearly but details remain undisclosed by the two parties.

Pirelli is the primary sponsor of the Italian football club Internazionale, or Inter Milan. The company launched a plant in China’s Shandong province in 2005 for the production of radial truck tyres. Since then, Inter players had begun to wear jerseys with “倍耐力” – Pirelli’s name in mandarin Chinese – four times each season to better market the Italian brand. “The world, as we know, is suffering an economic crisis but we are very optimistic about China’s situation,” said Giuseppe Cattaneo, CEO at Pirelli Tyre China Co. Ltd.

Chinese Super League is back on CCTV this year, after a three-match ban since last November for on-field fighting and club withdrawals caused by FA’s poor management. The league suffered greatly all these years by match-fixing, bribing and underground gambling. CFA told press early this month that judiciary professionals will join its regulatory bureau to help clean up cancers in the league.

The new 2009 seasonn of CSL will begin from today on March 21.

Photo: inter.it

Previously:

• Horse Lottery, Gambling and Chinese Football
• Chinese Super League Unbanned by CCTV
• Beijing to Stage International Football Festival This Summer

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The last issue of China Soccer

Another death penalty for Chinese football newspapers. China Soccer (中国足球报), a football news weekly jointly published by China Sports Publications Corporation (中国体育报业总社) and Chinese Football Association, fronted on its 872 issue last Tuesday that reads:

To adapt a new economic climate, we are to restructure our product. During the restructuring, China Soccer will temporarily cease publishing from March 10. Thank you, our readers, for your support all these years and being along with us. For subscription reimbursement please contact your local post office.

Editorial Team
March 3, 2009

Priced at 1 RMB ($ 0.15 USD), China Soccer is published every Tuesday covering mostly about Chinese football. The weekly was first published 15 years ago back in 1994, exactly the same year when China kicked off its professional football league. It enjoyed solid readership growth to about 400,000 people in the mid 1990s, when the Chinese Football Association Jia League (中国足球协会甲级联赛) was at its best.

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The new CSL season will be kicked off on March 21, with Shanghai Shenhua, Shandong Luneng and Beijing Guoan are among the favorites. While the defending champion Shandon Luneng lost their midfield general Zhou Haibin to PSV Eindhoven, Shanghai Shenhua spent over $ 8 ml USD in the transfer market this winter, snatching Mark Milligan from Newcastle United Jets in Australia’s A-League and another two players from FC MTZ-RIPO, a team in Belarusian Premier League. The Beijing Guo’an FC, or Imperial Guard, received a RMB 20 million yuan (roughly $ 2.92 million USD) boost from Beijing Municipal Bureau of Sport (BMBS) this January, and Li Weimiao, head of the Beijing Municipal Football Administrative Center, the football governing body under BMBS, became vice president of Guo’an Club.

There’s been rumors that the decision makers at General Administration of Sport in China (GASC) has been discussing whether to nationalize Chinese football by getting back clubs’ ownerships. “This could be the first step of GASC’s nationalization plan,” said Nan Fang, a former Beijing Guo’an midfielder to China Sports Review, “If they do it, they’re probably going to cross the river by feeling the stones.” Nan, co-founder and coach of Beijing Langyue Football School, attributes the futility of Chinese football to bad environment, namely fixed games and bribes in the league. “You can’t whiz everything back into the 80s. Things changed.” Aside from help fund a friendly match with world champion club Manchester Utd, BMBS will also help Guo’an develop youth players in the government-funded sports schools. “This would bring more young talents into the pool,” Nan noted. “I think the problem is whether they have enough good coaches there.”

China’s FA is currently in talks with Nike for a sponsorship deal. The sportswear manufacturer is reportedly to have prepared a 10-year-long contract for the clubs, with each club in the 2009 season could get equipments worth of RMB 5 ml and another RMB 1.5 ml fund. A lot money for some, the deal might not sound very riveting to big clubs like Beijing Guo’an, who is currently sponsored by Adidas.

Previously:

• Chinese to Enjoy English Premier League for Free?
• Go West! Chinese Footballers Now Can Transfer, Finally
• China May Juguo Its Professional Football League
  

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This Chinese New Year must have been a magical experience for Zhou Haibin (周海滨), a 23-year-old midfielder, who now finds himself joyfully as a PSV Eindhoven player. Before joining the Dutch side as a free transfer, the Chinese footballer has been playing at Shandong Luneng FC for 10 years.

While Zhou’s move was cheered by some, it definitely left Shandong Luneng FC and Chinese Football Association stunned. The Shandong club, who clumsily appealed to CFA trying to keep the player, was disappointed greatly after the association released a statement last week about their stand. Below’s our translation:

1. Some of CFA’s regulations on transfer and registration are different from FIFA’s. As a member of FIFA, CFA should obey FIFA’s regulations.

2. It’s a good thing for Chinese footballers to play in a high-level league overseas. As an important way to improve the development of Chinese football, we encourage more domestic players to play overseas.

3. CFA will speed up researching, improve its regulations on transfer and registration to better meet the needs of the development of Chinese football.

In China, if a player wants to be transfer-listed, he needs to let the club know in advance even if his contract already runs out. CFA rules state that a club have the ownership of its player up to 30 months from the last time he represented the team, which means Zhou’s ownership would remain at Shandong team untill 2011. 

However, according to FIFA’ Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players released last year, a professional shall only be free to conclude a contract with another club if his contract with his present club has expired or is due to expire within six months, which means a player like Zhou Haibin is entitled to sign for another team. Zhou is not the only one who discovered this new land, though. Feng Xiaoting (冯潇霆), same age as Zhou, received three offers from South Korea’s K-League teams, and completed the move to Daegu FC from Dalian Shide FC last month.

“Ninety percent of free agents in Chinese Super League would follow Feng Xiaoting and Zhou Haibin. Best of them can go to Europe, others can go to South Korea, Japan or the US, and the rest stay home,” wrote Xue Yong, Assistant Professor at Suffolk University and author of Conspicuous Soccer (《炫耀的足球》), in his blog. Mr. Xue half-jokingly titled his comment on the transfer news as Serfs Emancipation in Chinese Football.

Indeed, with AFC introduced its 3 plus 1 rule last year, which states that each team playing in the Asian Champions League is allowed to field four foreign players, one of whom must be from an Asian country, there will definitely be more opportunities for Chinese footballers. Gao Lin (郜林), a regular player in the Chinese setup who now plays at Shanghai Shenhua FC, is reportedly not willing to discuss a new contract with the team, and seeking out opportunities in European leagues. 

Related Reads:

• Xue Yong: Serfs Emancipation in Chinese Football (Chinese)
• AFC: Zhou move sparks ‘Bosman’ talk

Photo: PSV Media

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