The Evergrande crisis takes away Guangzhou, the great ocean liner of Chinese football

Guangzhou Evergrande has become the great dominator of Chinese football in the last decade, in which it has achieved eight leagues, seven in a row, and two Asian Champions League, thanks, in part, to the purchase by the real estate group that It has been on the lips of everyone whose debt amounts to more than 300,000 million dollars for weeks.

Evergrande acquired Guangzhou in 2010 in exchange for $ 15 million with the goal of dominating Asian soccer. To do this, the group provided a blank check to invest in players and coaches from Europe. These are the cases of Jackson Martínez in 2016 (48.6 million dollars) or Paulinho in 2018 (46.3), signed in the middle of the Chinese football bubble. Besides, technicians like Lippi, Scolari or Cannavaro, who left the club a few days ago, also contributed their bit.

The entrance to the club of Hui Ka Yan, owner of the real estate colossus, caused the valuation of Guangzhou Evergrande to skyrocket from $ 16 million to $ 3 billion in five years. But it wasn’t until 2017 that the team began racking up four consecutive years of financial losses that led in 2020 to announcing a plan to retire from soccer. A year earlier, the club accumulated losses of 270 million, a deficit that the construction company had to assume.

With all this, the general manager of the club, Gao Han, issued a letter at the beginning of September asking the municipal governments to take over part of the control of Guangzhou FC saying that Evergrande could not financially support the soccer team, although such and as reported Bloomberg, state authorities are considering the offer. An absolute crisis that persists even though the co-owner is Taobao, the e-commerce platform that belongs to Alibaba.

To make matters worse, in the middle of all this is the 1.8 billion dollar stadium that Guangzhou Evergrande already has partially built. The project, which initially aims to host 100,000 spectators, is still on the air. According Reuters, Guangzhou City Construction Investment Group could take over the site, in addition to the company’s other residential projects in the area.