At the end of 2016, the 33-year-old former Manchester United star Carlos Tevez, who was already playing football in his hometown of Argentina, was considering retirement. At this time, Shanghai Shenhua from Chinese Super League (CSL) came forward and convinced the unmotivated player to join the team with a 20-fold salary increase, paying him approximately £630,000 a week. This price was half a year’s fee for Guangzhou’s team, and it was higher than C.Ronaldo’s current salary of £480,000 at Manchester United, and Neymar salary of approximately at PSG. He was the top earning football player in 2017.
After reluctantly joined Shanghai Shenhua, Tevez’s performance was disastrous, and Shanghai Shenhua’s performance was even worse than the previous season. Tevez criticized Chinese football many times, saying that even in 50 years, Chinese football would not be competitive. He only scored four goals in 20 games he played, and the team ranked 11th out of 16 teams in the league with only 9 wins, 8 draws, and 13 losses. This was worse than their fourth-place ranking the previous year. Fortunately, they won the 2017 Football Association Cup. Finally, Tevez even said that his time in China was “like taking a seven-month vacation. In China, I took a seven-month vacation. Shenhua’s coach and chairman criticized me. No problem, because I don’t know what I was doing there.”
The Chinese Super League is notorious for its salary-based approach. Still, during the golden decade of 2016-2017, all teams could indeed offer higher transfer fees and salaries than even the top European teams. In addition to the retired players mentioned above, they also attracted active players. The most sensational transaction was when Shanghai Shenhua purchased Brazilian national team midfielder Oscar from Chelsea for £67 million in 2017, with a weekly salary of over £400,000. A year earlier, Shanghai Shenhua had purchased Brazilian national team forward Hulk for £45 million, with a weekly salary of up to £320,000, making him one of the five highest-paid players at the time. Both purchases were reasonably successful. At least in 2018, Oscar scored 12 goals in the league and helped the team break Guangzhou Evergrande’s eight-year championship winning streak. Hulk also scored 77 goals in 145 games in the four years he played. Shanghai Shenhua is now the only financially healthy team in the CSL, and Oscar is the only top-class foreign aid player who chose to stay in the CSL.
Other teams also brought in a lot of overpriced players. For example, in 2016, newly promoted Hebei FC signed Arsenal’s former striker Xie Yunnan. He only scored four goals in two years. In 2015, Guangzhou Evergrande signed Robinho, but he was not even selected for the substitute list in the later stages. In 2016, they spent €42 million to buy Colombian striker Jackson Martinez from La Liga’s Atletico Madrid, but he only played about 10 games over three years and scored just a few goals due to injuries.
With government support, many clubs signed top foreign aid players, and the number of spectators was also abundant. The CSL had the opportunity to further internationalize, but a series of man-made policy mistakes starting in 2018 caused it to lose everything.
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