Letters from Shanghai: The non-Asian “Asian” signing

By Andrew Crawford, writing from Shanghai

Despite the city starting to slow down for the Chinese New Year, Shanghai Shenhua’s PR machine remains as busy as ever. The club’s website is more brightly coloured than usual and images of the new manager, Jean Tigana, and his star player, Nicolas Anelka, flicker across the screen whilst behind them, four silhouetted figures stand in the background. ‘Who is the next’ asks the caption in English. As you can tell, the Shanghainese don’t do subtlety.

Instead of being appreciated as remarkable coups in in their own right, the sudden arrival of Anelka and Tigana have created a storm of big money rumours and since the arrival of the Frenchmen, the club has been variously  linked with Michael Ballack, Guti and Didier Drogba. Although these stories are quickly dismissed or debunked by the club’s fans and websites like Wild East Football, they highlight that our publicity hungry chairman, Zhu Jun, enjoys the limelight too much to deny any rumour linked to the team, no matter how ridiculous it is.

Whether by accident or design, all of this transfer speculation has helped move attention away from the players who might be leaving the club to actually fund these lavish transfers. The club’s flying winger, Feng Renliang, recently had a trial in Spain with Valencia, having previous been linked with Tottenham Hotspur, whilst the creative midfielder, Cao Yunding, has been rumoured to be a target for CSL side, Jiangsu Sainty.

Whilst the loss of Feng would be painful, the sale of Cao would probably be much harder for the Shenhua faithful. The winger’s performances tailed off at the end of the last season but Cao grew stronger with each game, which culminated in a spellbinding performance against our fierce rivals, Beijing Guoan in November.

To see the diminutive playmaker sold off after such a strong finish to the 2011 season would represent a new nightmare that our gutless, attention seeking chairman could drop us in. Not only is the potential sale of young talent to finance the arrivals of veteran players from Europe short-termism at its worst, it also neatly demonstrates the perilous situation that a number of clubs in China are facing. Zhu, as you will discover in future letters, is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to CSL owners who know little about the sport, holding a football team hostage to their whims.

Another unanswered question is where our other overseas reinforcements besides Anelka are coming from and how good they will actually be. Shenhua have already discarded all four of last season’s overseas players (teams in the CSL are allowed to have a maximum of five non-Chinese players in their team but can field three overseas players plus one more from another Asian country during the game).

Having allowed opposition teams to sail through the Shanghai backline with relative ease at times, the team is in desperate need of the sort of capable defensive players who are neither cheap nor freely available within Chinese football. The addition of the former Chelsea player means we should be able to score goals but right now, there isn’t much in the Shenhua ranks who can stop them.

Finally, despite the endless speculation, it should be noted that Shenhua have in fact done some transfer business in the form of Australian striker, Joel Griffiths.  Not only does it give Anelka a strike partner, it is also a nice piece of propaganda for the club- the forward was signed from Beijing and was part of the Guoan team that won the CSL in 2009.

The former A-League MVP, who will count as Shenhua’s non-Chinese ‘Asian’ player, is a fairly combustible character and has fallen out with a couple of managers in his career as well as infamously punching a linesman in 2007 whilst playing for the Newcastle Jets. It’ll be quite interesting to see how he and Anelka decide who takes the penalties this season.