This is all a far cry from the scenes just a few years ago. Remember, for example, how President Xi Jinping of China visited Manchester City’s Etihad Campus alongside the British Prime Minister David Cameron. Britain — and English football — was open to Chinese investment and two Chinese companies invested £265 million to buy a 13 per cent stake in City’s parent company. In England alone, Chinese investors poured into Aston Villa, Birmingham City, Southampton, West Brom, Wolves, Reading, Northampton Town and Wigan Athletic. One advisor says a woman known in the trade only as the “Dragon Lady” became a go-to contact for several middlemen seeking to attract Chinese investors into football clubs.
Some of those interventions have been utterly calamitous, most notably at Villa, Birmingham and Wigan and it is widely known that Southampton, West Brom and Reading are open to a sale. The Premier League terminated its £523 million deal with its biggest international broadcast partner, the Chinese PPTV, after only a year last month following a dispute over a withheld payment. There are several theories behind the Chinese withdrawal from the European game, including worsening political relations between China and the West, the impact of the pandemic and the sense that investors wrongly forecast that success in English football would curry favour with the Chinese government.
In many cases, rather than embellishing the country’s image, the actions of investors in fact caused reputational damage. One executive at a Chinese-owned club told The Athletic how the investor walked into a meeting one day and declared he wanted to make the club’s stadium a new base for the Chinese Confucius Institute. There are 548 Confucius Institute bases around the world, including at a number of leading universities. They claim to promote the Chinese language and culture but Human Rights Watch has alleged the institutes “are extensions of the Chinese government that censor certain topics and perspectives in course materials on political grounds, and use hiring practices that take political loyalty into consideration.”
The executive, who blocked the owner from implementing the institute at the club’s stadium, warned “it would have made Leeds’ Spygate look tame.”
On a more day-to-day football basis, the executive recalls how the owner thought he knew how to work the transfer market as he “played Football Manager” and a group of disgruntled Birmingham supporters recently described three senior boardroom figures as three “Football Manager wannabes” in an open letter expressing their bewilderment at the Chinese regime. Despite the diminished Chinese influence, one figure familiar with Premier League takeovers cautions that “China will return to the scene in some form”.
https://theathletic.com/2165936/2020/10/31/so-youre-filthy-rich-and-want-to-buy-a-football-club/?article_source=search&search_query=Reading