Opinion | Chinese football making the headlines it craves – for all the wrong reasons after violent FA Cup brawl

The free-spending Chinese Super League has done many things that you’d assume would warrant Chinese football dominating headlines around the world but nothing more so than an old-fashioned tear-up. That’s what happened at the end of the game between Jiangsu Suning and Wuhan Hongxing following their Chinese FA cup tie last week and various media outlets across the globe took notice.

To put this in context, let’s start with the Chinese FA Cup. The knockout competition began in 1995 but was dropped after Shandong Luneng’s win in 2006, before it was reinstated for the 2011 season by the country’s governing body.

The nature of the Chinese FA Cup, in following the world’s oldest cup competition in being open to all teams, presents a problem. And that problem is the mixture of Chinese professional teams with the country’s amateurs.

While there are strong claims that the world game began in China – there is evidence that a game called “cuju” which saw human heads improvise for footballs was the precursor to the beautiful game – it’s a latecomer to organised football.

Fast forward a few thousand years and we’ve got the professional game’s roots. Right now we have the big-spending Chinese Super League which came out of the Jia-A league – the top flight until 1994 – but there was more to Chinese football than this.

Before all of that was the mid-century establishment of clubs such as Dalian Shipyards (later the all-conquering Dalian Shide) and the 1980s semi-professional scene. This was the foundation of the game that flowered in the 1990s and has blossomed since.