Chinese invasion on Spanish pitch

Football

Just when it seemed there were no more boundaries to cross in soccer, the game has found a few more.

One involves the Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin's buying a piece of Atletico Madrid via his property company, Dalian Wanda Group. Given that Atletico needs money to sustain its upstart challenge to Real Madrid and Barcelona, it was perhaps only a matter of time before the Spanish club made a connection with a company eager to expand its brand globally.

Dalian is paying about $50 million for a 20 percent stake in Atletico, a deal that includes the club's visiting China on a regular basis and helping young Chinese players gain experience, both at home and in Spain.

But if that was intriguing, the second boundary crossed in the past week was grotesquely unwelcome. It came Sunday in Liege, Belgium, when a bunch of hooligans calling themselves the Ultras Inferno 96 reached a new low.

The fans smuggled into the stadium a huge banner that featured a sword-wielding villain, similar to the main character from the “Friday the 13th” movies, holding the severed head of a former Standard Liege player.

After the killings at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the apparent beheading of a Japanese hostage by Islamic State militants, this could hardly have been more insensitive or more irresponsible.

The Ultras' banner targeted Steven Defour, a Belgian midfielder who led Standard Liege to two league titles before he was sold to Porto in 2011. Last August, he returned to the Belgian league with Liege's bitter rival, the Brussels club Anderlecht.

Beneath a slogan that proclaimed “Red or Dead” (red is the color of Standard Liege), was what can only be described as a sick parody, with a character looking like Jason Voorhees of “Friday the 13th” holding a head meant to be Defour's.

Though Standard denounced the banner afterward, it whipped up a charged atmosphere before the match when it announced Defour's name last, to a chorus of boos, the newspaper ‘Het Nieuwsblad’ reported.

In that atmosphere, where he was being cast as a traitor, Defour lost his composure. He was sent off by the referee for seemingly deliberately kicking the ball at fans in the stands. Standard Liege won the game 2-0.

Immediately following the red card, there was unrest inside the stadium as Anderlecht supporters tore up seats and threw them onto the field.

Belgians weren't shy about sharing their feelings online about the gruesome banner.
While the police are out looking for culprits, one fan defiantly posted another picture of Voorhees on Facebook, with the words “I'm sorry - Not!”

Sorry is hardly the word that anyone in Spain or China would feel like saying about their collaboration between club and investor.

While Atletico played the first leg of the King's Cup semifinal in Barcelona on Jan 21, the club's president and its chief executive were completing details with Wang, whose company operates movie theaters, luxury hotels and department stores and is building theme parks.

For years -- generations, in fact -- Atletico fans had reveled in thumbing their noses at their more aristocratic rival, Real Madrid, the king's club. Atletico could proudly boast of its ability to find strikers like Fernando Torres, Sergio Aguero, Radamel Falcao and Diego Costa and then sell them on to clubs like Liverpool, Manchester City, Monaco and Chelsea.

It was those teams with deep-pocketed foreign owners who were able to acquire Atletico's ripened stars. Meanwhile, Atletico, shifting a pile of debt that ran in the hundreds of millions of dollars a few years ago, was somehow able to overcome all of its hurdles last season to win the Spanish league -- and nearly the Champions League, too.
Driven by Coach Diego Simeone, an Argentine who won a league title when he played for the club two decades ago, Atletico continues to defy credibility by turning sow's ears into silk purses.

The Malaysian Vincent Tan owns the Welsh club Cardiff City, while his countryman, the Air Asia chief Tony Fernandes, owns the London club Queens Park Rangers. The Singaporean investor Peter Lim has just taken a controlling stake in Valencia. But Wang has surpassed them all with his stake in a much more prominent club.

As Asia ascends economically, a new ball rolls in soccer, and not just with the English and French clubs bankrolled by Middle Eastern oil money.

Fifty million is a lot of dollars, although that would barely buy an arm and a leg of Real’s biggest stars, Cristiano Ronaldo or Gareth Bale. But Wang's business skills will no doubt enlighten those in the boardroom at Atletico's Vicente Calderon Stadium.

The new deal with Dalian has the potential to be much longer lasting, and include more influence over the way Atletico is run - and perhaps one day affect Chinese soccer as a whole, too.