Results tagged “manu”

Manchester City become the latest big European club to swing by China, as more fat cat chairmen attempt to stuff a slice of the lucrative East Asian football market pie in their already obese and money-obsessed faces. The English Premier League side take on Shanghai Shenhua on Friday night in the 2006 Shanghai International Football Tournament.

Former Shanghai Shenhua FC defender Du Wei finally made his long-awaited first team debut for Scottish giants Glasgow Celtic yesterday -- but it ended in shambolic farce for player and club and it could well be his only appearance for the SPL side.

According to a recent survey conducted on behalf of London’s Birkbeck College, China’s soccer fans are as keen as ever on footie-behemoth Manchester United, with one important factor cited as being the opportunity for fans to see top players performing to the max on the field. “If they go to watch top performers in action, Chinese fans want to see them perform well,” the findings reveal. Well what a disappointment this season’s English premiership competition must have been to them so far. Ten points adrift from leaders Chelsea in the table, sitting ignominiously behind Tottenham Hotspur and minnows Charlton Athletic, and having suffered defeat at the hands of Blackburn, following which manager Sir Alex Ferguson was booed by his own fans, Man U’s sparkling performances have not exactly been coming thick and fast to delight stalwart Chinese fans. But you would be hard-pressed to predict that this love affair will do anything but die hard. Following this summer’s friendly between the English premiership side and Beijing Hyundai, the China Daily noted, “thousands of Chinese fans in the crowd of 24,223 in Beijing's Workers Stadium wore red Manchester United jerseys”. The club has its own Chinese website, www.manunited.com.cn, offering, among other things, an SMS information service for fans requiring up to the minute news on the team. Perhaps more importantly, the club also just signed its first ever Chinese player, Dong Fangzhuo, who debuted in the Beijing Hyundai Game alongside the likes of Wayne Rooney and Rio Ferdinand. However, it would nonetheless appear that the pre-match hopes of many a Chinese supporter have been borne out in what has been seen of the 2005 Premiership season so far. The survey reveals of Chinese fans attending the Beijing game that “many indicated they were at the game in anticipation of Beijing claiming a shock win”. With the way things are currently going for the northern England team, perhaps not such a vain hope after all …

Bayern Munich became the latest club to pimp itself out on the web to Chinese football fans, following in the footsteps of Man U.