By AFP and Entorno | 2025-01-08

BEIJING -- Guangzhou FC, China's most successful football team and former Asian champions, has been thrown out of the country's professional leagues because of "heavy historical debt," the club says.

The eight-time Chinese Super League (CSL) winners, once managed by Marcello Lippi and Fabio Cannavaro, have effectively died, signaling the end of an era in the domestic game in China.

Dozens of Chinese clubs, including fellow former CSL champions Jiangsu Suning, have folded in recent years in debt.

"The club tried various means to gain access to the professional league," said Guangzhou FC, formerly Guangzhou Evergrande.

"However, because of the heavy historical debt burden, the funds we raised were insufficient to clear them."

Property market slump

The Chinese Football Association (CFA) excluded Guangzhou from a list of 49 teams in China's professional leagues for 2025.

Guangzhou once dominated Chinese football, winning seven consecutive CSL titles from 2011 to 2017 and two AFC Champions League crowns.

But it was relegated to China's second tier in 2022 after its majority owner, the property developer Evergrande Real Estate Group, ran into financial difficulties as the country's property market slumped. The club's last title came in 2019.

Guangzhou had invested heavily in players, breaking China's transfer record multiple times as Evergrande Group pumped millions into the squad.

It paid $46 million, then a record for an Asian team, for striker Jackson Martinez from Atletico Madrid in 2016.

The deal came during an era of big spending by Chinese teams.

In that period it had a string of illustrious foreign managers including Italian World Cup winners Lippi and Cannavaro and Brazil's Luiz Felipe Scolari.

Liabilities

In 2020 the club began construction on a new $1.86 billion stadium that Evergrande Group said would hold at least 80,000 fans.

The project was cancelled in 2022 as the group racked up $300 billion in liabilities.

The club was renamed Guangzhou FC in 2021 after new CFA rules forbid teams from including references to companies or sponsors in their names.

Guangzhou finished third in second-tier China League One in the 2024 season, missing out on promotion to the next level.

"We express our sincerest apologies to fans and everyone from all walks of life that have supported the club," the club said in its statement on January 6.

Faltering football dreams

In 2015, President Xi Jinping set an ambitious goal to transform China into a global soccer powerhouse. This effort to pair China's economic ascent with success on the soccer field symbolized Xi's broader vision for national greatness.

"My biggest hope for Chinese soccer is that its teams become among the world's best," he declared in 2015, as reported by The New York Times.

However, this dream has faltered amid corruption scandals, a slowing economy and a string of disappointing sporting results, leaving the vision of becoming a football superpower far from realized.