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The "Golden" Era of Chinese Super League:

The firms who initiate this era is Evergande Group, which is ranked 6th in the Chinese real estate company. The firms bought one football club located in Guangzhou and renamed it as Guangzhou Evergrande Football Club. In their first season of CSL, they bought Darío Conca with a recording breaking transfer fee of 8.2 million euro. By investing heavily on expensive foreign players, the result is that they have won the league champion, and they never concede it until 2019. In the meantime, they also won two Asian Champions League title. (The first Chinese club that ever achieve that.

The huge success of Guangzhou Evergrande Football Club also made its owner lucrative as he once become the "richest person in Asia with net worth of $43 billion". The owner once revealed its secret: "Advertising on the CCTV is about 150,000 per second. When we played a game, 25 TV stations broadcast live, and more than 300 media reported it. How much would it cost to advertise? " In short, it uses popularity of the football in China to advertise its firm in a most effective way.

All the other firms soon starts to follow, the real estate giants in China start to invest in the major clubs that played in the China Super League(CSL). Huge amount of money is poured into CSL, “from 2011 the salary of Super players increased tremendously, the gains in three years are more than 20%, in 2013 the growth was nearly 43%, Chinese football player’s average annual salary are nearly around 300 million or so (do not consider winning bonuses). ” However, in the meantime, “....CSL clubs’ expenditure are higher than revenue. In 2013, the CSL overall loss account of 264 million yuan and a loss of 220 million yuan in 2014; In 2015, despite the explosive growth of income reaching a new high, but due to unreasonable revenue and expenditure structure, the overall loss reached 1.5 billion yuan, the loss has reached 60% of revenue" . This means that it is an extremely unsustainable system that cannot functioning by itself without external funds.

In 2020, as COVID-19 started, the whole world soon moves into the lockdown, everything changed. Companies refuse to pay player's salary, the CSL are suspended due to COVID-19. Clubs in CSL suddenly found that they have no source of income, then, one by one, they are sunken into crisis: "In February, China’s defending champion, Jiangsu Suning F.C., was abruptly shuttered by the electronics retailer that owned it, less than four months after the team won the Super League championship". "Shandong Luneng, the Chinese FA Cup winner, was kicked out of the Asian Champions League last month for failing to pay employees." "Tianjin Tianhai, which once had World Cup winner Fabio Cannavaro as manager, declared bankruptcy last May and folded."