(http://sports.163.com/18/0221/09/DB5JCI3R00058781.html)

 Who is Paulinho? There are many Brazilians named Paulinho, but the one I’m going to talk about in this blog is José·Paulo·Bezerra·Maciel·Júnior, who is now a player at FC Barcelona.

  To Chinese soccer fans, Paulinho is a big star now, but not in the past. Although he had an unhappy experience in Tottenham Hotspur, where he was transferred to Guangzhou Ever Grande. At the time when he transferred, fans of Tottenham Hotspur even celebrated, because they finally let such a “bad player” go away. Likewise, fans of Guangzhou Evergrande cast doubt on his ability. However, in the 1/4 final game of AFC Cup, Guangzhou Evergrande VS Kashiwa Reysol FC, Paulinho gained his fame by a marvelous freekick. 30 m from the goal, he kicked out the ball like a canon, and the ball made a weird curve in the air——all players thought it was going to fly out of base lines——, dropping into the goal finally. The goalkeeper did nothing but stood still, even didn’t move a little bit.

  After that game, Paulinho got more and more attention. In 2015’s AFC cup, he helped Guangzhou Evergrande won the championship, which qualified this team to enter FIFA Club World Cup. At Club World Cup, he performed even better. On Dec 13^th, Guangzhou Evergrande confronted Club de Futbol América, one of the greatest teams in northern America. It was Paulinho’s goal at the 89^th min that helped Guangzhou Evergrande defeated Futbol América by 2:1. Then came his tipping point in his life, the 1/2 final of Club World Cup, Guangzhou Evergrande VS FC Barcelona. Although Guangzhou was apparently much weaker than Barcelona, Paulinho was considered as the only Guangzhou player who displayed the same level as Barca players. After the end of the game, Messi had a brief conversation with him and said, “You did a good job. Do you wanna come to Barcelona?” Then, in 2017, Paulinho transferred to FC Barcelona at a price of 4 million Euros., which set a new record in Chinese soccer history, for this is the first time that a European top-level team had got a player from Chinese soccer league. Since then, Paulinho has been considered as a legend by Chinese soccer fans. Speaking of him, they usually say proudly: he comes from CSL!

But on the other hand, Barcelona fans’ view on Paulinho is different. Although in some games, Paulinho created good chances and even scored game-killing goals, his shortage is very apparent: he doesn’t have good skills of traditional Barcelona players. He always loses ball from his foot. After the UEFA Championship game yesterday, Chelsea VS Barcelona, Spanish soccer media criticized Paulinho as “nightmare performance” Facing world-level team, Paulinho’s shortage has always been “amplified”, which is so deadly for Barcelona.

Paulinho is still a good player. However, if he wants to

(from https://baike.baidu.com/pic/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E8%B6%B3%E7%90%83%E5%8D%8F%E4%BC%9A/2703217/0/d009b3de9c82d1585b0c662d870a19d8bd3e429b?fr=lemma&ct=single#aid=0&pic=d009b3de9c82d1585b0c662d870a19d8bd3e429b)

(Please note that all the term “football” in this article refers to “soccer”)

Chinese Football Association Super League (CSL) is the soccer league with the highest level in mainland China. Although it only has a history of 14 years, CSL is rapidly developing and gaining international reputation. By 2017, according to the ranking of IFFHS (International Federation of Football History and Statistics), CSL is the 36^th soccer league in the world and the 3^rd in Asia.

One of the reasons why CSL thrives a lot within years, is that more and more Chinese companies invests it by purchasing teams, copyright and players. The most famous team in CSL, Guangzhou Evergrande FC, used to be Guangzhou FC, which was just an ordinary team in China. However, after being purchased by Evergrande Group, whose owner is one of the wealthiest Chinese merchants, Guangzhou Evergrande has achieved 7 CSL Championships, 3 Chinese Football Association Super Super Cup Championships and 2 Champions of AFC Champions League in 7 years. As for the copyright, in 2017, China Sports Media Group got the copyright of CSL through biding, at the price of 8 billion RMB (roughly 1.33 billion dollars). In addition, many world-famous soccer players choose to transfer to Chinese teams. For instance, Drogba transferred to Shanghai Shenhua FC in 2012; Robinho and Paulinho played for Guangzhou Evergrande FC; Texeira and Ramirez are now playing for Jiangsu FC. To some degree, it seems that CSL is a new rival against MLS: The excellent players who should have chosen MLS, are now considering CSL.

However, something unexpected happened. In 2016, CFA (Chinese Football Association) enforced a new policy called “U23 Policy”, which said that the starting lists of all CSL teams should include at least one player aging no more than 23 years old. To cope with this policy, some teams just let U23 players play for the first a few minutes and substituted them, which was very funny. Then, in 2017, CFA enacted another policy, which triggered a larger debate. The policy regulated that, since 2018, all the player transaction involving more than 4.5 million RMB, will be levied a heavy tax called “Transaction Moderation Fee”. Which means that teams will be more and more reluctant to pay a lot of money to buy famous, extraordinary players from Europe. It’s said that, Obame Yang, who played for Dortmund, should have been transferred to Guangzhou Evergrande FC months ago, but his transaction was broken due to the “Transaction Moderation Fee”.

Many soccer fans in China criticized that CFA’s regulations are making CSL more and more “unprofessional”. People are expecting more and more superstars playing in China, but now this dream has been destroyed. Without international soccer stars, how can a league gain population? This is indeed a serious problem.

On the other hand, some others argued that the regulations are necessary. They help to provide Chinese native players a platform to practice and display their ability, which may benefit the performance of Chinese National Soccer Team in the future.

So how should CFA regulate CSL? It is still under hot debate now. In my opinion, if it really proves to be helpful for Chinese National Team, these kinds of regulations are necessary, though a little ridiculous.