Leon Wobschall: Football-mad China needs to deliver on its Eastern promise

ASTRONOMICAL wages, a sumptuous lifestyle, fan adulation and wanting for nothing.
Odion Ighalo.Odion Ighalo.
Odion Ighalo.

The brochure enticing sportsmen to the new land of footballing opportunity of China is certainly a glossy one.

The lure of the Middle Kingdom has its obvious attractions, chief among them being the financial remuneration, with well-known global names such as Oscar, Carlos Tevez, Pato and Axel Witsel beating a path east to ply their trade in the new Chinese Super League.

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Working in bustling super-cities such as Beijing and Shanghai in China also offer considerable cosmopolitan distractions and chic living, mixing with the high achievers at the epicentre of the world’s fastest growing economy.

Other provincial venues, particularly in the country’s west and north-east offer more challenges and a culture shock to the new influx of footballers who have found the allure of China impossible to resist.

And therein lie more difficulties, as China’s star import from the Premier League in £20m Changchun Yatai signing, former Watford striker Odion Ighalo, may well discover.

Although a weekly wage packet of £190,000 might just soften the blow.

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Simon Chadwick, professor of sports enterprise at the centre for sports business at Salford University, who has been charting the rapid rise of the Chinese football industry, said: “It really depends on where a player goes. If he goes to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou or Shenzhen, they can live exactly the same lifestyle as they do here. There are good places to eat and good housing.

“On that basis, the Ighalo transfer was striking as most of the big prosperous cities are in the east of China and where he has gone where it is much less well developed and much more difficult to lead a normal ‘western’ lifestyle.

“It is geographically quite remote from rest of China and quite different.”

Despite the geographical and cultural contrasts to consider for those professionals who have headed to China, it is clear that its footballing star has never shone brighter.

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The league has been created to facilitate China’s declared aim of becoming a world footballing superpower by 2050 and to develop a national team capable of winning the World Cup is well known. With that, comes pressure.

Chadwick said: “My view is that the league is already a threat (to the European) leagues when you look at the players transferred such as Jackson Martinez and Axel Witsel, who were rumoured to be talking to the likes of Arsenal and Tottenham.

“The fact that China have signed them ahead of British and European clubs already makes a statement. It just depends on how the Chinese can sustain this as it takes decades to build a footballing culture.

“We have already seen problems. Last November when China played Syria in a World Cup qualifier, China lost and football fans protested on the streets, which is the last thing that the Chinese government wanted.

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“The response was to sack the national team coach and hire Marcello Lippi for $18m. When you raise people’s expectations, they want results.

“China needs to start delivering on its promises sooner rather than later or it will cause (further) disquiet among the population.”

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