Chinese Football — Big Spending, Big Dreams, Big Problems

For most of its history, Chinese football was not well known outside Asia. The Chinese Super League — the top division of professional football in China — had existed since 2004, but it struggled to attract attention on the world stage. All of this changed dramatically in the mid-2010s when Chinese club owners, many of them backed by large state-owned companies or wealthy private investors, began spending enormous amounts of money on foreign players and coaches.

Between 2015 and 2018, Chinese clubs broke transfer records that shocked the football world. In January 2017, the club Shanghai SIPG paid around £60 million for Brazilian attacking midfielder Oscar from Chelsea — one of the most expensive transfers in history at the time. Just weeks earlier, the same club had signed Hulk, another Brazilian international, for a similarly huge fee. Clubs such as Jiangsu Suning, Guangzhou Evergrande, and Beijing Guoan also brought in big names from European leagues, offering wages that even the richest clubs in England, Spain, and Italy found difficult to match. At its peak, the Chinese Super League was spending more money on transfers than any other league in the world — more than the Premier League, more than La Liga, more than the Bundesliga.

The spending boom was not just about entertainment. Behind it was a much bigger ambition — China's president Xi Jinping was known to be a football fan, and he had stated publicly that he wanted China to qualify for, host, and one day win the FIFA World Cup. Football was seen as a symbol of national pride and international prestige, and developing the sport was made an official government priority. Hundreds of new football schools were built across the country. Foreign coaches were brought in to train young Chinese players. The government set a target of building 70,000 football pitches across China by 2025.

However, the reality on the pitch did not match the ambition off it. While Chinese clubs were buying the world's best players, the Chinese national team continued to struggle badly. The national team has only ever qualified for one FIFA World Cup — in 2002 — and they were knocked out in the group stage without scoring a single goal. Despite all the investment in the domestic league, the quality of Chinese players did not improve fast enough. Critics argued that filling the league with expensive foreign stars actually made things worse — Chinese players had fewer opportunities to play, develop their skills, and gain experience.

By the early 2020s, the era of big spending in Chinese football had come to a sudden and dramatic end. Several of the clubs that had led the spending boom ran into serious financial difficulties. Jiangsu Suning — who had just won the Chinese Super League title in 2020 — announced in February 2021 that they were disbanding the club entirely due to financial problems at their parent company. Guangzhou FC (formerly Guangzhou Evergrande) fell into deep debt and were eventually relegated from the top division. Players and staff went unpaid for months at several clubs across the league.

The Chinese football authorities introduced new rules to try to control spending. Salary caps were introduced to limit how much clubs could pay their players. Foreign player quotas were tightened, reducing the number of overseas players allowed in each team. The transfer window became much quieter as clubs lost their financial backing. Several high-profile foreign players quietly left the league as their contracts ended, returning to Europe or moving elsewhere. The Chinese Super League, which had briefly been the richest league in the world, became a much smaller and more cautious competition almost overnight. It was a sharp and painful lesson in the dangers of building a football league on borrowed money and unsustainable investment.

Today, China's national football team remains one of the most underperforming teams in the world relative to the size of the country. With a population of over 1.4 billion people, China is the most populous nation on earth, yet the national team regularly struggles to qualify for major tournaments. In the 2026 World Cup qualification campaign, China found themselves in a difficult group alongside Japan, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain — and qualification looked extremely unlikely for most of the campaign.

The gap between China and the leading Asian football nations — Japan, South Korea, and increasingly Australia — remains large. Japan in particular has developed a very different model, focusing on youth development, technical coaching, and sending players to compete in top European leagues. Many Japanese players now play regularly in the Premier League, the Bundesliga, and Serie A. Chinese players, by contrast, rarely make the move to top European football. The future of Chinese football now depends less on spending money on foreign stars and more on the difficult, slow work of building a proper grassroots system — good coaches, good facilities, and a culture where football is played and loved from a young age. That transformation, if it happens at all, will take a generation.