- Aug 29, 2012
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Give it time. I think it's worth keeping an eye on. The market potential is so huge....
Huge but given their rules (which of course can change) their squads are actually much more limited than Europe.
Chinese teams can have 5 foreign players of which 1 has to be from a nation in Asia. All the remaining players are expected to be from China.
I think everything that is going on in China is very interesting but despite the money there are still issues. Keep in mind the issues both Drogba and Anelka had with their pay when they were over there. China is going to be a completely different environment from anything any of these players have experienced before and my guess is that a few will not enjoy it.What i think will be really interesting is how many of this current wave of players heading to China stick around for multiple years.
I think it will be interesting to see how China develops long term, they are spending money to build up the academies and have set fairly reasonable goals from the sound of it. They seem to raise their profile in Asia and become more significant in the AFC (realistic and plausible but they are still trialling Korea and Japan by a bit), they want to improve their domestic players (not a quick task but not a huge reach), they want to host a WC (would think China could make a better pitch than Qatar and they proved they could put on a show with the Olympics), they want to get more people paying attention to their league (they have 1.3 Billion people so that is doable). If they keep the goals fairly reasonable they could conceivably reach them.