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On Sunday, the 2024 Chinese Super League campaign came to a close with Kevin Muscat leading Shanghai Port to a thrilling title victory. getting the job done in style with a 5-0 win over Tianjin Jinmen Tiger to finish a solitary point ahead of local rivals Shanghai Shenhua.
It marked a fine first year at the helm for the Australian, who has now enjoyed success in three of Asian football’s most-prominent leagues — following similar triumphs in the A-League and J1 League with Melbourne Victory and Yokohama F. Marinos respectively.
The fact that the title race went down to the wire despite Port boasting a manager of Muscat’s quality, along with a formidable squad still led by former Chelsea and Brazil star Oscar, highlights just how competitive the top tier of Chinese football remains.
Still, the Chinese Super League is no longer swimming with stellar names as it was a decade or so ago; a situation that is a far cry from when luminaries such as Fabio Cannavaro, Carlos Tevez, Didier Drogba and Robinho were calling China home.
So what exactly is the Chinese Super League since its big-spending era came to an end?
Firstly, it is imperative to travel back to when it all began and how the Chinese football bubble eventually burst.
As early as 2012, the Chinese Super League’s biggest clubs began to rival — and surpass — their more-illustrious European counterparts in the sheer monetary offers that were being put in front of players and coaches. Drogba and Nicolas Anelka would renew their formidable Chelsea partnership at Shenhua, who would also be graced by the likes of Tevez, Tim Cahill and Obafemi Martins to name but a few of their prominent imports.
Rivals Guangzhou Evergrande had an equally formidable roster headlined by names such as Robinho, Alberto Gilardino and Jackson Martínez — although it was in the dugout where they made the most headlines with the appointments of two FIFA World Cup-winning tacticians in Marcello Lippi and Luiz Felipe Scolari, while giving Ballon d’Or winner Cannavaro his first taste of management.
The balance of world football, dominated by the history and wealth of Europe for so long, was suddenly beginning to tilt towards Asia.
“That’s the danger, that the Chinese offers become the benchmark for Europe,” Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger warned at the time. “You cannot compete with that.”
Then, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2021, things went dreadfully awry.
Debts that had already been accumulating went into overdrive. Revenue for broadcast and sponsorships dwindled as live sport came to a halt and, even when games resumed, their behind-closed-doors nature rendered ticket sales irrelevant.
With China one of the nations most affected by the pandemic, there were soon far more pressing concerns for many of its major conglomerates, whose ownership of football clubs were viewed by cynics as mere vanity projects. Not long after Jiangsu FC become Chinese Super League champions for the first time, the club was abruptly dissolved as owners Suning Group opted to focus on Inter Milan, which it then owned.
It was around the same time that Chinese football authorities — in a bid to curb what was now proving to be unsustainable spending — banned commercial sponsorships of team names, a restriction that has since been eased since the start of this year.
Salary caps were implemented and while some players like Oscar and — until his recent retirement — Marouane Fellaini remained, the face of the Chinese Super League would drastically change. These days, clubs are still bolstered by stars from abroad, but their numbers are far fewer. And without lavishly paid imports — whose salaries made it impossible to be left out a starting XI — a wave of young local talent has begun to emerge.
Yet, it has not necessarily reaped immediate rewards in the three years since the Chinese Super League’s upheaval.
At present, China’s three representatives in the AFC Champions League Elite — the continent’s top-tier club competition — have combined for four victories from nine outings. Port, Shenhua and Shandong Taishan all still stand a chance of reaching the knockout round, but the era when Evergrande (now simply known as Guangzhou FC and playing in the second tier) were crowned champions of Asia in 2013 and 2015 seems a long time ago.
There remains the underlying issue of alleged corruption and, just back in September, the Chinese Football Association slapped lifetime bans on 43 individuals for match fixing.
On the international stage, China‘s national team has struggled in the Asian qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup, having only scraped through to the third round of qualifying via a superior head-to-head record with Thailand.
The Chinese currently sit bottom of Group C with four points from four matches, but only after scraping to a 2-1 win over Indonesia in their last outing, with their three earlier defeats including a humbling 7-0 rout at the hands of Japan and a 2-1 loss to Saudi Arabia — where they contrived to relinquish an early lead despite playing with a numerical advantage for over 70 minutes. To make matters worse, national talisman Wu Lei may have just concluded a record-breaking 34-goal campaign for Port in the Chinese Super League, but he is yet to get off the mark in the third round of World Cup qualifiers.
It isn’t all doom and gloom though.
The arrival of Muscat saw Port reach a new level in 2024, making history with their 78-point and 96-goal season, along with a formidable 16-game winning streak (18 including cup ties) between May and August. Shao Jiayi, a former 40-cap China international who had a notable spell playing in the Bundesliga, showed real promise in his maiden year in management as he guided relegation candidates Qingdao West Coast to safety.
Meanwhile, the demise of former powerhouses such as Guangzhou and Jiangsu have paved the way for a team like Chengdu Rongcheng — a club which only reached the top flight in 2022 — to qualify for continental football for the first time. And next season, the Chinese Super League will be graced by a new face in Dalian Yingbo, who were only founded three years ago but have now achieved back-to-back-to-back promotions all the way from the fourth tier of Chinese football.
All of this, of course, will sound very familiar. The rise of the Saudi Pro League, with its recruitment of the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Karim Benzema and Co., has all the hallmarks of the Chinese Super League’s ambitions from almost a decade ago. And while the bursting of the Chinese football bubble may read as a cautionary tale for other ambitious leagues, the subsequent reset and refocus proves that football marches on regardless.
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