The Chinese Super League has hit the headlines in recent months for its unprecedented spending on some of world football’s biggest names.
Shanghai SIPG paid $63 million to sign Oscar from Chelsea, while Shanghai Shenhua made 33-year-old Carlos Tevez the highest paid player in the world, offering him reported wages of $765,000 — double the amount Cristiano Ronaldo earns.
But while the capture of big-name and big-money players has created waves around the football world, the gradual influx of highly-regarded coaches has caused little more than a ripple.
Going into the 2017 season, 13 out of the league’s 16 teams are managed by foreign coaches, including 2002 World Cup winner Luiz Felipe Scolari, English Premier League winner Manuel Pellegrini, multiple German Bundesliga champion Felix Magath and former Chelsea, Porto and Zenit St. Petersburg manager Andre Villas-Boas.
There’s also Italy’s 2006 World Cup-winning captain Fabio Cannavaro and former Yugoslavia skipper Dragan Stojković, who was a European champion with Marseille.
Another former international star now coaching in China is Gus Poyet. The Uruguayan enjoyed a successful spell with Chelsea and won the Copa America as a player, before managing Brighton, Sunderland, AEK Athens and Real Betis.
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While many have written off the CSL as a lucrative payday for players wanting to wind down their careers, Poyet is happy to defend the Chinese government’s ambitious project of making the country a global football superpower.
“I think the league is getting better and better,” the new Shanghai Shenhua coach told CNN’s World Sport show ahead of this weekend’s opening round of games. “In the beginning, most people thought it was only about the money.
“It’s true there is plenty and it is difficult to explain it, but now they are bringing players that are younger, that are at the top of their form and the competition is becoming more and more difficult.
