31 Jan 2013
Last fall Zhu Jun, a Chinese Internet multimillionaire who
convinced the Didier Drogba to join his Shanghai Shenhua football club, noted that
Drogba had a two-and-a-half year contract. Despite rumors that Drogba was on
his way out, the relationship between player and team “wasn’t a one-night
stand.”
Zhu was right. The relationship between the star Ivorian
striker and the mediocre Chinese team was actually a six-month fling. Now after
half a season in a Chinese league better known for poor play and corruption—the
“Allegedly Super League,” as the Guardian once called it last year—Drogba is leaving for the Turkish
side Galatasaray. For most of Drogba’s short stay in China, talk swirled
about his imminent departure as Zhu battled Shenhua’s other owners for control
and wages for some of the team’s foreign players reportedly went unpaid. This
week the long expected exit finally happened, after Galatasaray announced it
had signed Drogba to an 18-month deal that will see him earn $13.5 million and
a per-game fee of $20,000. After the Chinese season ended in November, Drogba
had discussed playing on loan for Chelsea, the club he left last summer after
leading them to a Champions League title. The move was blocked by FIFA, the
sport’s international governing body. Shenhua are challenging Drogba’s move to Galatasaray, saying he
still has two years on his contract.
Drogba, 34, arrived in Shanghai as a conquering hero but was faced with a terribly unglamorous task: dragging Shenhua up from the basement of the Super League. He showed the same enthusiasm with which he attacked the world’s top defenses in Europe, energizing a team that was sitting in 13th place in a league of 16 teams when he arrived. Even Nicolas Anelka, a former Chelsea teammate who had come to Shenhua six months ahead of Drogba, showed moments of newfound inspiration. For most of his year in China, however, Anelka displayed the same indifference to competing that he had as a French international during the 2010 World Cup, when he led a team revolt against the coach and was sent home early. Last week Italian squad Juventus said it had signed Anelka on a loan for the remained of the season.
But while Anelka lived up to his nickname of “Le Sulk” while
at Shenhua, Drogba showed he is one of the hardest working men in the sport.
Last year he went from the European season almost directly into the Chinese
season and will now join Galatasaray’s Turkish and Champions league campaigns
after he finishes with the African Cup of Nations, where he is representing the
Ivory Coast.
He hardly takes a breather on the pitch. I watched him play
for Shenhua against Dalian Shide on a sweltering August night last year. He was
aggressive and direct—plowing into opposing players, flailing for loose balls,
crumpling at the slightest touch in hopes of drawing a foul. At one point
midway through the second half, while double-marked in the opposition corner,
he lofted a shot from an improbable angle that clanged off the crossbar. Aside
from Drogba though, Shenhua showed little guile. They often got bogged down in
midfield and had a hard time delivering the ball to their star striker. The
game ended in a scoreless draw.
For the first two months after Drogba arrived Shenhua were
undefeated in league play. They finished in ninth place, better than they were
sitting midseason but far off the team’s goal of finishing in the top four and
thus qualifying for the Asian Champions League. For Chinese football fans long
used to failure and frustration, particularly when their men’s national team
faces foreign competition, the significance of Drogba’s arrival was not just
about what he meant for Shenhua or even the Super League, but what he meant for
the sport in China as a whole. Zhu, the Shenhua chairman, told me last fall
that he thought Drogba could help elevate the country’s level of play. “In
China people don’t know what organized football is,” Zhu said. “They certainly
won’t listen to me. So I brought in a star to show them. Every day they can see
what a good player Drogba is and how he plays football. And then they will
realize what football is.”
Such justification is a bit like saying that by buying a
Ferrari you can help everyone get home faster by improving traffic flow. Still,
the wages paid at Drogba by Shanghai—he was reportedly making $200,000 a
week—plus the lucrative sponsorship deals from companies targeting the China
market, means more big names will follow. And while rich teams bankrolled by
tycoons spending their way to victory may sound wearily familiar to fans of
European soccer —
and, say, baseball in America — it’s a welcome change in China, where owners
and officials have been known to buy success more directly, by paying off a
referee or a few corrupt players. Chinese teams are still nowhere close to the
standard of those from England, Germany, Spain or Italy. But if throwing
ridiculous sums at big name players is any measure, they’re starting to even
the score.
