Boasting one of the most forward-thinking academies, closely aligned with the government, Daniele D’Eustacchio is shaping the future of Chinese football
Tag: china
Guangzhou may be known as the money-bags of Chinese football today but it wasn’t long ago that they were in the second tier, broke and hit by scandal
Though Britain is credited as the founder of structured, organised football, the game extends thousands of years back in its most primitive form
Was Dong Fangzhuo a genuine signing based on talent and potential or did Manchester United snap him up in 2004 to break into the growing Chinese market?
Ten years ago, on 7 November 2008, Aston Villa wrote themselves a small place in the history of Slavia Prague, one of the Czech Republic’s most successful clubs, with four titles to…
This feature is part of A Tale of One City The word Shanghai is written with two characters in Chinese: 上 (shang) and 海 (hai). The first one means “above”, while the…
THE NEW SOCIETY OF AC MILAN doesn’t sound too far from something the iconoclastic Italian politician and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi would have dreamed up, but it is in fact the symbolic…
WHEN STEPHEN CONSTANTINE TOOK CHARGE of the Indian national team for the second time, he found out that Indian football’s elite academy recruited players from just two youth tournaments in New Delhi.…
Illustration by Federico Manasse ON THE LAST OCCASION Barcelona announced the acquisition of an expensive Brazilian footballer, in the summer of 2013, it was the prodigiously talented and fresh-faced Neymar who had…
CARLOS TEVEZ, CLAD IN A DEEP BLUE KIT, stepped out onto the pitch and soaked in the adulation of thousands of impassioned fans. It’s a scenario that the Argentine has encountered hundreds…
As featured on Guardian Sport THE 2015/16 WINTER TRANSFER WINDOW was the first time that the world really took note of Chinese football. Huge amounts of money were spent over the winter months…
It’s the 84th minute of a helter-skelter contest between Shijiazhuang Ever Bright and Jiangsu Suning when a Colombian striker by the name of Martínez surges into the box and kills the game…
Building a respectable reputation in any line of work requires time, effort, the right results and plenty of satisfied customers. It’s the very same in the world of football management. Yet something gives…
CHINESE FOOTBALL HAS BEEN GRABBING THE HEADLINES RECENTLY, mainly due to the huge transfer fees that have been paid to entice players to head east. These transfers have made headlines around the…
To take a hurried look at Chinese football and then condemn it as a spectacle inferior to anything produced upon the European continent is an incredibly easy thing to do – and something…
ALTHOUGH THE EACT ORIGINS OF FOOTBALL ARE STILL unclear, the Chinese game of Cuju (or Tsu’ Chu) has been recognised by FIFA as the earliest form of the game, dating back to…
The odyssey of Rudi Gutendorf, the German who saw genocide, corruption and coached 18 national teams
NOT MANY COACHES in the history of professional football can provide first-hand accounts of genocide, tell stories of a close connection to a South American president, or put manager of 18 different…