Guangzhou Football Club, a subsidiary of China Evergrande Group, announced that it had negotiated with the Italian head coach Fabio Cannavaro (Fabio Cannavaro) to terminate the contract. The Italian announced that he had left the club and won eight Chinese Super League championships. The two-time AFC Champions League champion team.
Guangzhou Football Club (formerly known as Guangzhou Evergrande Football Club) issued an announcement on Tuesday (September 28) stating that Cannavaro will terminate the contract with Cannavaro through friendly negotiation.
Due to Cannavaro’s high salary and liquidated damages, this development is seen by the outside world as an aspect of Evergrande’s debt crisis. It has been reported that the most successful Chinese Super League club in the past decade is facing Financial crisis, there are even reports that the team may withdraw from the Super League in the second half of the year.
The 48-year-old Cannavaro’s annual salary for the Guangzhou team is reported to be as high as 11 million euros, and the contract has a huge liquidated damage clause. The contract between Cannavaro and Evergrande originally expired at the end of 2022.
The Guangzhou team, which was scheduled to start preparing for the second half of the Super League last Thursday, did not gather as scheduled, and the news that the team will terminate the contract with Cannavaro has been circulating in the Chinese media for some time. Tuesday’s announcement put an end to all speculation about the prospects of the relationship between the two parties.
After years of unconstrained expansion, the Evergrande Group, whose main business is real estate, has fallen into a serious crisis under Beijing’s change of its management policy on large capital. It is reported that Evergrande’s debt exceeds US$300 billion.
Xu Jiayin, the chairman of the group who was once the richest man in China, has admitted that Evergrande is currently in the “darkest moment.”
Foreign marshals under the Chinese football system
Cannavaro, who took office in 2017, has coached the club for the second time, leading the team to the Chinese Super League championship in 2019 and winning runner-ups in 2018 and 2020.
The captain of the 2006 World Cup winning team had briefly replaced the meritorious coach Marcello Lippi (Marcello Lippi) to coach the Chinese Super League team in 2014, but was fired in 2015 and was led by Brazilian coach Luis Filipe. Scolari (Luiz Felipe Scolari) took over.
After that, Cannavaro coached Tianjin Quanjian Club and led the team from the Chinese Premier League to the Super League. He immediately finished third in the team’s first Super League season, and was re-employed to coach the Guangzhou team in 2017.
The Guangzhou team acquired by Evergrande Group in 2010 is the most successful football club with the largest investment in the past 10 years. It has won 8 championships in the Super League in the past 10 seasons, and has been coached twice in Lippi and Scolari. Aspiring to the Asian club championship, at the same time, it also created a number of player transfers that set new records in the Super League transfer fee and salary.
However, the Guangzhou team under Cannavaro’s leadership has never reached the height of Lippi and Scolari. In 2018, the Guangzhou team, under his coaching, put the Chinese Super League champion next to Shanghai SIPG for the first time in eight years. Last year, they lost to Jiangsu Suning again in the championship, which caused Cannavaro to face the crisis of dismissal.
On the other hand, the Chinese Football Association has also introduced a number of new rules in recent years, including clubs must pay 100% “adjustment fees” for high-priced transfers, setting salary caps for professional players, and suspending the naming rights of professional league team sponsors starting this year. All have an impact on the capital scale of the league and the development model of each team. Coupled with the continuation of the new crown epidemic, which has led to a decline in ticket revenue and an unfixed league competition system, many clubs are facing varying degrees of crisis.
At the beginning of this year, last season’s Super League champion Jiangsu Suning Club took the lead in announcing its dissolution, setting an embarrassing record of the immediate dissolution of the top league champions.
The Guangzhou team was also severely affected. Under the salary limit order, the Brazilian Paulinho (Paulinho, Paulinu) and Talisca (Anderson Talisca), the main players who were the key figures of the team, have successively terminated their contract. Leaving the team greatly affected the strength of the Guangzhou team this season.
Although Cannavaro still leads the team into the 2021 Super League championship group, the crisis of Evergrande Group has made the team’s financial future face huge uncertainty. According to Chinese media reports, Evergrande Group is actively requesting China The Football Association returned the signing adjustments previously handed in to allow the team to insist on completing the league this season, otherwise they will face the possibility of withdrawing from the Super League midway.
However, Cannavaro was loved by Guangzhou fans during his coaching period. After he was suddenly fired in 2015, he was seen off by a large number of fans when he left at Guangzhou Airport, and he spontaneously sang a Cantonese song to greet him, which became a hot topic.
After taking over the coach for the second time, the relationship between Cannavaro and the club’s leadership has been cracked from time to time, and rumors of “dismissal of get out of class” have been spread many times. In 2019, after the result of a game was not as expected, Cannavaro was once arranged to “class” to learn Evergrande’s corporate culture, and an assistant coach would take care of it.