Chinese association takes action
Record champions excluded from professional leagues
January 7, 2025 – 2:00 p.mReading time: 1 min.
In 2022, the former series champion was relegated to the second division due to the majority owner’s financial problems. Now things go deeper downhill.
China’s most successful football club Guangzhou FC has been excluded from the national professional leagues due to financial mismanagement. As the club, which celebrated all of its great successes between 2011 and 2019 under the name Guangzhou Evergrande, announced that excessive debts had led to its exclusion by the Chinese Football Association (CFA).
The eight-time Super League champion and two-time Asian Champions League title holder tried “to stay in professional football” using “a variety of means,” it said in a statement, but “the funds raised were not enough to pay off the debt burden.”
As early as 2022, Guangzhou suffered a sporting setback due to the financial difficulties of the majority owner, the real estate developer Evergrande Real Estate Group, in the wake of the collapse of the Chinese real estate market and was relegated to the second Chinese league. There, Guangzhou took third place at the end of last season and thus missed out on promotion.
On the way to the last championship title in 2019, the Evergrande Group had previously pumped millions into the squad. Guangzhou broke Chinese transfer records several times. The club transferred around 42 million euros to Atlético Madrid in 2016 for the Colombian striker Jackson Martinez alone, thereby setting an Asian transfer record.
In 2020, the club also began construction on a new stadium costing more than one and a half billion euros, which, according to the Evergrande Group, should hold at least 80,000 fans.
The project was canceled in 2022 because the group had accumulated the equivalent of almost 300 billion euros in liabilities.