Sun Jihai apparently plays for Renhe which recently relocated to Beijing so you wouldn't bet against it being them.
I don't know, I would bet against it. I know Renhe's name has been mentioned a few times in relation to this story, but I'd like to think that CFG have more business sense than to buy a team solely because a former player of ours (albeit one we have kept good links with) plays for them. After all, a 38-year old player is not going to be there for very long before he retires, and if we were only interested in the club so that we could bring him in after retirement as a staff member then...well, why couldn't we do that at literally any other club in China?
If we do end up linking up with Renhe, it will surely be because we wanted a club in Beijing and couldn't sign a deal with Beijing Guoan, and Sun Jihai will be a purely coincidental employee.
Some very average players have gone to the Chinese league for silly money so would that make it more difficult for uefa?
Well, there are multiple ways of looking at it. You're right that the Chinese overpay for players, but making money out of China isn't as easy as just saying "from now on, every player we want to leave we will force to move to our CSL club". The majority of players when they leave aren't going to want to go there, so we won't make
that much at the end of the day that way, so the only effective way of doing it would be to either sign players for the sole purpose of instantly selling them to China or moving on a number of youth players. Either way is going to look a fair bit dodgier than Hulk being sold for £45m because at least Hulk was a first team player beforehand.
There's also that China may overpay but there's never been an instance of a Chinese team paying a team they are corporately linked to for a player. On top of that, at the most cynical end of the scale, you could point out that UEFA created FFP specifically to hinder us, and so their previous record with allowing in income from China is irrelevant because we were never the ones benefiting from it before. After all, it's not like UEFA have to show their FFP calculations to an external auditor, so they are free to be absolutely as biased as they want to be.
All this aside, this is interesting timing for this story to be reemerging because it's just struck me that it was only a few weeks back I was reading an interview conducted with Tom Glick where he basically made comments along the lines of that CFG don't like the way that the CSL is set up on the basis of unsustainably high spending, and that they don't want to get involved while the business model is so heavily slanted towards teams being propped up by wealthy owners. Makes me wonder what really is the truth behind this all, and perhaps makes me wonder if CITIC are twisting ADUG's arm into going ahead with the China plans in advance of when they'd actually want to get involved.
