Letters from Shanghai: The Madness of chairman Zhu

By Andrew Crawford, writing from Shanghai. View all letters.

The Chinese Super League is on a brief hiatus whilst the national team tries diligently to work its way up the international rankings. It also gives Shenhua fans the chance to reflect on a season that saw expectations soar and hopeful ambitions aggressively massaged into the anticipation of a victory procession.

Not so fast.

Indeed, as the dust starts to settle and the midway point of the season exposes itself to inquiry, the team is in the bottom half of the table, its expensive French striker has scored twice all season and suddenly the new dawn has disappeared in the clouds.

Expectations are always high for traditional powers in any league but in Shanghai, this year was going to be different. The team’s owner, Zhu Jun was promising the world with the world’s sport pages as his manifesto. The great and the good of world football were soon to land in Pudong International Airport. Nicolas Anelka first and Didier Drogba a little later. Shenhua blue was soon to rule the world.

Now, with the lull in football proceedings, heads are turning back to Zhu and his false promises. Shenhua fans didn’t mind the Chinese video games mogul using the club to raise his profile nor that his company’s new release is on the front of the team’s shirt in place of a more lucrative sponsor. The catch with the da laoban (big bosses) of Chinese football is and always will be that they play fair and give a little back to the football club that they are milking for attention, money or more often than not, both. The Shenhua chairman hasn’t and it is in these quiet moments that Shenhua fans remember how much their club has lost to one man.

Zhu first came to people’s attention in 2007 when, as owner of cross town rivals Shanghai United, he spend 150m RMB ($19.2m) to acquire a controlling interest in Shenhua, who were then a regular fixture in the Asian Champion League. His impact was immediate and irreversible. The two clubs were merged and Wu Jingui, who had guided Shenhua to a league title in 2003, was sacked in the same week as his mother died. Oswaldo Jimenez, Zhu’s no.1 at United, took over the new look of Shenhua, although the former manager of the Uruguayan national team soon found himself becoming his chairman’s lackey. Things reached a speedy nadir in the same year as the Shenhua takeover after Zhu demanded he be named in the starting line-up for a friendly against Liverpool. The owner would last ten minutes before he had to be substituted, panting and clearly out of breath.

Jimenez didn’t stay long after that, setting in place a frenetic merry-go-round of appointments. First, Wu returned for a brief stint before he too packed it. The former Chinese international, Jia Xiuquan would then take the reins in September 2008, an appointment made largely because of his supposed willingness to indulge Zhu’s meddling. He would last for just one season before being sacked (soon after, he was arrested for taking bribes whilst coach of the Chinese U-21 team).

Miroslav Blazevic, the legendary journeyman manager followed in 2009 but left after a year. In that time, Zhu openly proposed a scenario where the Croat would coach the team for domestic games whilst Diego Maradona would run the team for the following year’s Asian Champions League campaign that Shenhua hadn’t yet qualified for. Blazevic’s assistant, Drazen Bezek, stayed on for a year as boss but he too quit after a season that saw a player exodus, Shenhua playing all their domestic cup games four hours away in Wuhu(Zhu’s idea) and an eleventh place finish that was Shenhua’s worst in the CSL era.

This all brings us to 2012, where Shenhua’s owner has already managed to use up all of the goodwill from the Nicolas Anelka signing. The undoubtably costly sacking of Jean Tigana, the poor start to the season, a dramatic increase in season tickets (as much as 150% in some areas of the stadium) have all been of significant annoyance to a fan base that would dearly like to be done with Zhu as quickly as possible.

This brings us back to Drogba, who has become a kind of Godot-like figure in the Shanghainese press, albeit one that is always coming tomorrow to put his signature on an reported two year, $21.8 million contract. Zhu needs him desperately- both to restore him and the club back into the global spotlight but also to revitalize a squad that looks drained and humiliated from the club’s poor start to the season.

Moreover, should the Ivorian go somewhere else, Zhu might just run out of friends in Shanghai. The funds injected into the club for Tigana and Anelka’s contracts came from a government-backed company, which basically means that Zhu is playing with other people’s money. Five years of meddling has turned one of China’s leading clubs into a shambles and the same powerful people who threw sizeable amounts of cash at what they thought was a title run will be wanting far more bang for their buck. Zhu could soon be seen to be standing in the way of such expectations and the politics of the situation might, might just push Shenhua’s owner into going through with his longstanding but rarely believed threat to sell up. If Drogba arrives and somehow saves the season, Shenhua will be stuck with their Achilles heel for another season. Rarely could twists of fate be much crueler.