The Chinese Super League, not a long time ago one of the wealthiest leagues in the world, has crashed. Excessive investment has resulted in the Chinese football bubble bursting, with the current league champions Jiangsu FC being the latest and biggest club to cease operations after another 15 outfits fell by the wayside, in just the last year across the top three divisions.
While this chaos will mark the end of the Chinese Super League as we know it, it could also represent a chance for Chinese players to grow and get into new adventures at foreign clubs. The high salaries they received until now will surely stop existing and they’ll become realistic targets for clubs from all around the world, especially considering how profitable it can be to have a Chinese player given the size of the country and its TV audience.
In this data analysis, we’ll find the best Chinese central midfielders in the Chinese Super League.
Methodology
We’ve used data and statistics from Wyscout to analyze the 66 central midfielders who have played more than 400 minutes in the Chinese Super League in the last year. We’ve included both Chinese and foreign players so we can compare how the local players behave in the league.
The grey area in the graphs is the one between the 25th and 75th percentile, meaning 50% of the players fall in that area for every given metric. The thin line represents the value that leaves half of the players on each side of it.
The colours show the nationality of the players, with red being Chinese and green being foreign. The filled circles represent the players who made the final shortlist so it’s easy to spot them throughout the analysis. These players are Cui Ming’an (26, Dalian Pro), Che Shiwei (24, Tianjin Teda), He Chao (25, Guangzhou FC) and Xu Xin (26, Guangzhou FC).
General profiling
As a first approach to the 66 central midfielders we have in our list, we’ll look at how much and how effectively they’re involved in both attack and defence. We’ll look at successful attacking actions per 90 (y-axis) and successful defensive actions per 90 (x-axis). With these metrics, we’ll have a good idea of how all the central midfielders affect the games.
Let’s start with the outliers. There are three household names above everyone else in terms of attacking actions: Oscar, Renato Augusto and Moussa Dembélé. The three of them are well-known very good players who still have the quality to have an impact in the top leagues. They would be the obvious choice for any team looking for a foreign attacking midfielder in the Chinese Super League.
Looking at local players, which is the goal of this analysis, the player with the most successful attacking actions per 90 is Xu Xin, a 26-year-old Chinese playing for Guangzhou FC, with 4.46 per 90. Like Dembélé, Xu Xin also contributes to the defensive phase and registers 7.49 successful defensive actions per 90. Xu Xin came through Atlético Madrid academy and at 26 it could be a good time to try his luck in Europe again. Zhou Tong (31, Wuhan FC) is also worth mentioning with 4.21 successful attacking actions per 90.
