China’s wealthy football clubs ‘should look to grassroots’

After Shanghai SIPG paid £60 million to take Oscar from Chelsea, clubs have been told they should implement salary caps and use some of their cash to develop local talent.

Brazilian football player Oscar arrives at Shanghai airport on January 2, 2017. The midfielder Oscar became the latest megbucks marquee player to arrive in China, joining Shanghai SIPG for £60 millionShow more

China’s cash-flush football clubs need to establish salary caps and set up special funds to develop homegrown talent, a spokesman with the country’s sports authority told state media on Thursday.

Driven by the football-loving president Xi Jinping, China is using its financial might to invest in prestigious overseas clubs like Inter Milan, and its own teams are spending heavily to coax marquee players into the domestic game.

In the latest high-profile transfer, Shanghai SIPG signed Brazilian international Oscar from English club Chelsea in a deal said to make him among the highest paid players in the world witha weekly salary of about £500,000 (Dh2.2 million). However, even that pales by comparison to the top paid player, Cristiano Ronaldo, who pulss in a cool £1m before tax at Real Madrid.

But the official news agency Xinhua said on Thursday that Chinese clubs have been “burning money” on the acquisition of expensive and overpaid foreign talent and have neglected the development of domestic players.

It cited an unnamed spokesman with the general administration of sport of China (GAS) as saying that China needed to introduce new measures to encourage homegrown talent.

“Set an upper spending limit for the acquisition of players and for player salaries … and conduct research into using a proportion of the clubs’ spending on high-cost signings to establish a football development fund to be used for youth training,” the spokesman was quoted as saying.

To help nurture “hundred-year clubs” rooted in local communities, China needed to put its teams under stricter financial supervision, and seriously insolvent clubs should be forced out of the league, the spokesman said.

He even suggested authorities could adjust the way points were awarded in each game in order to encourage homegrown talent to play a bigger role in matches, although he did not provide details on how this would work.

* Reuters

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