Source: Ma Dexing Dexing Society
The 2023 Super League season is finally back! When 24,000 fans flooded into the 8 Chinese Super League games on average, when the top three Wuhan Three Towns, Shandong Taishan and Zhejiang teams were all pulled down in the Super League last season, when the recognized new season When the relegation favourites, the Shenzhen team, captured the newly promoted Qingdao Manatee 2-1 at home, the football we were looking forward to finally returned to our real life. Although the competitive level of the Chinese Super League still needs to be improved urgently, especially the level of foreign aid newly introduced by each team is really hard to compliment, but at the moment when Chinese football is facing unprecedented difficulties, the restart of the Chinese Super League is already a challenge in itself. “Small victory”.
Ideal activities are abundant
After three years of the baptism of the epidemic, when the new season of the fully liberalized Chinese Super League restarted, nearly 200,000 people flocked to the eight stadiums in the first round of eight games to witness the first round of the Chinese Super League. Except for the match between Zhejiang and Shenzhen, the number of spectators in other games exceeded 17,000. Among them, the Zhejiang team had to temporarily move their home court to Huzhou because of the Asian Games, and only 4,858 people entered the stadium; the Shenzhen team, due to well-known reasons, caused fans to wait and see, and only 8,163 people entered the stadium to watch the game. The most, of course, was Xingongti, which hosted the opening match, with a total of 46,818 people entering the stadium to watch the match.
According to official data, in the first round of eight games, the total number of spectators was 191,553, with an average of 23,944 per game! Frankly speaking, if the Zhejiang team can play at the Hangzhou Huanglong Stadium, the situation of the Shenzhen team will not be the same as it is now. It should be very easy for the average number of spectators in the first round of the Chinese Super League to exceed 25,000 in the new season.
It is commendable for the Chinese Super League to have such an attendance rate in the first round of the new season. Although the outside world flickers the so-called “retaliatory watching and consumption”, in fact, the attendance rate in the first round of the 2019 Super League season before the epidemic is incomparable. In the same 16-team size and 8 games, the first-round attendance The number of fans in the field is 242,936, with an average of 30,367 per game. Therefore, after the restart of the Chinese Super League, it is far from the so-called “revenge watching”, not to mention that the current Chinese Super League cannot be compared with the past in terms of market appeal, reputation of foreign aid, and level of foreign teachers, let alone needless to say The current realistic environment and atmosphere of Chinese football.
However, when the leagues of neighboring South Korea and Japan entered the 2023 season, the media of the two countries kept saying that the attendance rate of the league had fully recovered, and even began to exceed the situation before the epidemic. However, compared with the first round of the Chinese Super League, it still seems not worth mentioning. According to the official data of the Korean Professional League, the total number of spectators in the 6 games of the first round of the K-League this year was 101,632, with an average of 16,939 per game. The total number of spectators in the first round of the 9 games of the J-League in Japan was 169,821, with an average of 18,869 per game.
Attached is the attendance statistics of the first round of Super League
4.15 Dalian People vs. Nantong Zhiyun Dalian Sports Center Stadium 22199 people
4.15 Wuhan Three Towns vs Shanghai Seaport Wuhan Sports Center Stadium 35868 people
4.15 Zhejiang Team vs Changchun Yatai Team Huzhou Olympic Sports Center Stadium 4858 people
4.15 Beijing Guoan vs Meizhou Hakka Beijing Workers Stadium 46818 people
4.16 Henan Team vs Chengdu Rongcheng Team Zhengzhou Navigation Stadium 17133 people
4.16 Tianjin Jinmen Tigers vs Cangzhou Lions Tianjin Olympic Sports Center Stadium 31681 people
4.16 Shanghai Shenhua vs Shandong Taishan Shanghai Stadium 24833 people
4.16 Shenzhen Team vs. Qingdao Manatee Team Shenzhen Universiade Center Stadium 8163 people
It is worth noting that perhaps all Chinese football players are well aware of the current reality of Chinese football. While the anti-corruption is still deepening, and when the Chinese Super League is restarting, all parties are also trying to find ways to save the industry, especially The clubs hosting the first round of the home game are looking for various marketing “spectacles” and trying to restore the popularity of the Chinese Super League. For example, when the New Workers Stadium was fully launched for the first time and hosted the opening ceremony, Wei Wei, the singer of the theme song of the Asian Games in “Asian Heroes”, returned to the stage after 33 years; when the Shanghai Shenhua team returned to the Shanghai Stadium, they played When the national anthem was played before, Olympic champion Xu Jiali was invited to lead the singing and so on. Each home court can work hard to find ways to create various activities on the field and attract more people, especially young people, to participate and watch the game live. This may be the theme that will run through the entire season.
Behind the upset of the top three
Go back to the green field. After the first round, last year’s top three Wuhan Three Towns and Zhejiang teams in the Chinese Super League lost to their opponents 0-2 at home, while the league runner-up and FA Cup champion Shandong Taishan team was defeated by Shanghai Shenhua team in the away game. This result is somewhat unexpected. It was also unexpected that the Shenzhen team, which is considered the biggest favorite for relegation, won the newly promoted Qingdao Manatee team 2-1 at home. And the emergence of these unpopularities has a lot to do with the full return of the home and away system.
Affected by the epidemic, the Chinese Super League in the past three seasons had to be completed with a centralized game system, but to a certain extent, games under the centralized game system are not considered professional leagues at all. In particular, games had to be played behind closed doors. Although fans are allowed to enter the stadium in individual games, and the home and away system was partially restored in the second half of last year, it is completely different from the first round of the new season of the Super League this year. In the first round of the competition, with so many fans entering the stadium, both teams were somewhat nervous. After all, it has been three years since they experienced such cheers and cheers like a sea of people and a tsunami.
In this case, each player’s reaction on the spot and the stimulus received are completely different. Moreover, this also objectively speeds up the pace of the game and the processing of passing and receiving the ball faster, and the entire confrontation intensity is also significantly higher than that of the Chinese Super League in the previous three years. Correspondingly, various mistakes also increased significantly. The most typical one is probably the “fairy ball” scored by Wu Xi of the Shanghai Shenhua team. With this goal, New Shenhua won the first victory of the season in their new home court, and they also defeated the favorite team Shandong Taishan in the new season. This will obviously be of great benefit to the team in the next game. Similarly, the Shanghai Seaport team, another favorite to win the championship in the new season, pulled down the defending champion Wuhan Sanzhen team in an away game, which will also give the team more confidence in their impact on this year’s league championship.
Through the first round of the competition, there is actually a very clear signal: In the future, the teams may not be able to use the performance and results of last year or the past three years as a reference at all. Therefore, the strength and weakness of the teams may not be simplified. It is still necessary to go through the first few rounds of the new season to understand the true strength of the Super League teams more clearly.
Super League quality foreign aid decision
After the first round of matches, a common situation that has to be felt is: the quality and trend of this year’s Chinese Super League, I am afraid that foreign players still “have the final say.” Moreover, although the league has only played 8 games in the first round, the performance of the foreign aid of each team, especially the new foreign aid, can be said to be panoramic.
Take the opening game of the new league season as an example. When Beijing Guoan returned to Xingongti, the construction of professional football stadiums and various facilities should be said to be quite beautiful, even comparable to World Cup stadiums. But when the match between the Guoan team and the Meizhou team started, I believe that more fans have such a feeling: the home team is not worthy of such a new stadium! Regardless of other things, in terms of the three new foreign aids introduced by the team in the new season, it may be difficult to rank among the top in the comparison of foreign aid among the 16 teams in the entire Chinese Super League. Although the team’s four foreign aids are mainly in the midfield, the quality of the four foreign aids cannot even be compared with Zhang Yuning. Therefore, fans watching the game are more concerned about when Zhang Yuning will come back? With such a configuration of foreign aid, why does Guoan strive to win the championship?
The defending champion Wuhan Three Towns lost 0-2 at home to Shanghai Seaport. It has to be said that the presence of the Brazilian Oscar in the midfield has indeed improved the Harbor team’s midfield by more than two levels. Therefore, the “top card” of foreign aid in the Super League in the 2023 season should still belong to Oscar. However, it should also be admitted that after halftime, the three main players of the Wuhan Three Towns team went off the field, including the two absolute main foreign players Aziz and Wallace, which seriously affected the competitiveness of the Wuhan Three Towns team. Moreover, the team had to make three passive substitutions, and it was impossible to adjust tactics through subsequent substitutions, and finally lost 0-2.
In the match between Shanghai Shenhua and Shandong Taishan, which is also the focus of battle, the newly introduced Teixeira made Shenhua fans secretly rejoice, but the performance of Malelai made Shenhua fans not flattered. Similar situations have appeared from time to time in other Chinese Super League games or have been criticized by fans.
It has to be said that in the current environment and atmosphere of Chinese football, clubs and teams will no longer spend “wrong money”. However, I also know that the Super League team will definitely not be able to do without foreign aid, so I want to “Taobao” in a cheap and high-quality way. At least from the situation of the first round of the game, among the newly introduced foreign players, except for Teixeira of the Shenhua team, it is true that no new foreign players that “make people shine” have been found. This may affect the trend and arrangement of the entire league this year.
From another point of view, after the “lively” first round of the Chinese Super League, will there be so many fans who will continue to enter the scene in the second and third rounds of the Chinese Super League? This may require the Chinese Super League teams to improve their technical and tactical standards as soon as possible.
As far as the first round of the Chinese Super League is concerned, after the cancellation of the U23 policy, the only thing that is gratifying is: Xia Hezati, a small Xinjiang player born in 2006, began to represent the Shenzhen team in the Chinese Super League last year. Get the chance to start and use the penalty kick to help the home team rewrite the score to 2-0, thus refreshing Huang Bowen’s record for the youngest goal in the Chinese Super League that year. This is the real “new idea” in the Super League in the new season, and I hope that more newcomers will emerge.