Opinion

Goals win games: with a lack of top strikers, how can China solve its goalscoring conundrum?

Foreign players are scoring the vast majority of the goals in this year’s Chinese Super League, and the effects of that are showing at international level. But it’s the foreign players’ goals that people are tuning in to watch

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Colombian Freddy Montero was on target for Tianjin TEDA at the weekend, part of a trend of foreign players grabbing the goals in the CSL.

Formerly of the South China Morning Post, Jonathan White has written about sport from China for nearly 15 years, and covered the Beijing 2008 Olympics, the Fifa World Cup in Brazil in 2014 and the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

Published: 4:20pm, 12 Sep 2016Updated: 5:03pm, 12 Sep 2016

While the Manchester derby was acting as an advert for everything that’s good about the Premier League this weekend, Jiangsu Suning Sainty and Shijiazhuang Everbright were doing their best to showcase the reasons for watching the Chinese Super League.

The game finished 6-1 to Jiangsu Suning but there could have been a lot more goals, with Shijiazhuang missing two penalties. Aside from the end-to-end football, countless chances and both faces of Chinese goalkeeping, the game also highlighted one of the problems with the Chinese game: that foreigners tend to score all of the goals.

Of the seven on show at the Yutong International Sports Centre on Sunday, there was only one goal scored at the right end by a Chinese player, with an own goal and five strikes by foreigners, including an Alex Teixera hat-trick.

Watch: highlights of Jiangsu Suning’s win over Shijiazhuang Everbright

This was not an isolated incident in this weekend’s CSL fixtures. Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao’s 3-0 win over Hebei China Fortune FC included a goal each for Brazilians Ricardo Goulart and Alan, while Guangzhou R&F’s 1-1 draw with Shanghai Shenhua saw a goal from Brazilian Renatinho that was equalised by Colombian Giovanni Moreno.