Following Ramires’ €28 million move from Premier League champions Chelsea to the Chinese city of Nanjing to play for the Chinese Super League club Jiangsu Suning, many football fans have been left to ask why China?

The Nanjing-based club is hardly the best known, nor the most successful one in China. Last season they could only finish ninth, 32 points below champions Guangzhou Evergrande, in a league that is not known for the quality of its football. However, they were able to win the Chinese FA Cup and there is some Chelsea connection as they are managed by former Blues defender Dan Petrescu. They play their football in a 61,000 capacity stadium and routinely turn-out in front of crowds totalling 27,000 or more. Their ability to attract a player of Ramires’ calibre at the peak of his career represents something big happening in Chinese football.

A Chinese consortium, CMC, recently bought a 13% stake in Manchester City owners City Football Group, and the likes of Malaga (Spain), Den Haag (Netherlands) and Sochaux (France) are now owned by Chinese investors. At the same time, China’s football teams have quietly been vacuuming up talent at outrageous costs for a while now and with a raft of established, European-calibre players at or near their primes heading eastward this transfer window, it’s becoming clear that China is very serious about featuring some of the world’s best.

That’s a good number of high-profile European players totally willing to leave some of the most prestigious leagues and clubs in the world in favour of joining a basically anonymous league in a country with a completely different culture. The Super League has targeted mainly the Brazilian players and if the departure of players from Europe to China looks like a mini-exodus in the making, the transfer of players from the Brazilian league to China looks more like the Rapture. Chinese teams have plundered reigning Brazilian Serie A champions Corinthians this month, buying up four of their key players – Gil (Shandong Luneng), Jadson (Tianjin Quanjian), Ralf and Renato Augusto (Beijing Guoan).

The recent Corinthians raid is only the latest example of this trend. Robinho, Diego Tardelli, Luis Fabiano, Walter Montillo, Ricardo Goulart, Dario Conca, Marcelo Moreno, Aloisio, Wagner, Hernan Barcos, Rene Junior, Geuvanio – these are some of the best players from the Brazilian league who have jumped the ship to China over the past few years. That’s excluding guys like Demba Ba, Paulinho, Alan, Mohamed Sissoko, Edu, Alessandro Diamanti, Asamoah Gyan who made their way to China via Europe. Throw in managers like Luiz Felipe Scolari, Mano Manezes, Alberto Zaccheroni, Gregorio Manzano, Vanderlei Luxemburgo and Sven-Goran Eriksson, China also offers an array of coaches who have held the reigns at some of the biggest teams across the globe.

It’s really insane when you look at how many quality players and managers who very easily could still be plying their trade in the top European leagues have made their home in the Far East. All this is because the riches on offer on the other side of the world are just too much to resist.

So, where does this money come from? Most of the top clubs who employ the marquee names are owned by huge, multi-billion dollar Chinese corporations. These aren’t a handful of billionaires; these are entire companies that generate hundreds of billions in revenue. At the same time, the league’s burgeoning status as one of the world’s richest domestic competitions has been driven by reforms introduced by President Xi Jinping in November 2014, whose plan is to create a domestic sports industry worth $850 billion by 2025. At the heart of passionate football fan, Xi’s plan is to want China to bid for the right to host and then to win the World Cup. As a result, the last fifteen months have seen the development of football in China being fast-tracked at a breath-taking speed.

Ramires is just one of the many high-profile players who are now the part of this Chinese revolution as foreign talent is bought in to promote the development of top level professional football. Such signings are already yielding results. Despite a Chinese club never having won the Asian Champions League before 2013, Scolari’s Guangzhou Evergrande has now won it twice in three years. Some people have even begun to label them as Asia’s first ever football mega-club.

Yet such is China’s desire to be accepted as one of football’s superpowers that huge amounts of money are being invested in grassroots football and spent on domestic talents like Jinhao Bi (€11.1m), Lu Zhang (€9.8m), Ke Sun (€9.2m), Ning Jiang (€8.35m), Haifeng Ding (€7.1m), Chao Gu (€7m), Xuri Zhao (€4.2m) etc. If China is going to win the World Cup then it wants to do so by developing their own domestic players rather than naturalising players from other countries. This is important as the country seeks to build its own heroes, icons and legends, with whom the fans can relate and identify.

It will be fascinating to watch how – if – the Chinese Super League and the football in China grow going forward. One thing for sure is that China has already solidified itself as one of the renowned non-European destination for top quality players. For that designation, the league competes with the likes of Major League Soccer and the UAE Arabian Gulf League, which also offer inflated salaries but, for the most part, have only been able to attract really good players to join their leagues once it was obvious they could no longer perform week-in-week-out at the top.

There is no doubt, Ramires is a big coup but he isn’t the first or won’t be the last high-profile player heading out to the Far East, there will be more – Wayne Rooney’s name has often been mentioned as China’s next big target. This coupled with an increase of Chinese ownership in European football, and sponsorship agreements like the one that Chinese company Ledman signed with Portugal’s second division which requires the top 10 teams in that league to sign and feature at least one Chinese player, China is strengthening its grasp on football. If the growth of their influence in other industries is anything to go by, then the success of this Chinese revolution appears almost inevitable.

The post China – The Rise Of Football’s Future Superpower appeared first on IntoTheTopCorner.