Guangzhou FC, China’s most successful football team and former Asian champions, have been thrown out of the country’s professional leagues because of “heavy historical debt”, the club say. The effective demise of the eight-time Chinese Super League (CSL) winners, once managed by Marcello Lippi and also Fabio Cannavaro, signals the end of an era in the domestic game in China. Dozens of Chinese clubs, including fellow former CSL champions Jiangsu Suning, have folded in recent years in debt.

“The club tried various means to gain access to the professional league,” Guangzhou FC, formerly known as Guangzhou Evergrande, said.

“However, because of the heavy historical debt burden, the funds we raised were insufficient to clear them.”

The Chinese Football Association (CFA) excluded Guangzhou from a list of 49 teams included in China’s professional leagues for 2025.

Guangzhou once dominated Chinese football, winning seven consecutive CSL titles from 2011 to 2017 and two Asian Champions League crowns.

But they were relegated to China’s second tier in 2022 after their majority owner, property developers Evergrande Real Estate Group, ran into financial difficulties as the country’s property market slumped. The club’s last title came in 2019.

Guangzhou had invested heavily in players, breaking China’s transfer record multiple times as Evergrande Group pumped millions into the squad.

They paid $46 million, then a record for an Asian team, for striker Jackson Martinez from Atletico Madrid in 2016. It was in an era of big spending by Chinese teams.

In that period they had a string of illustrious foreign managers including Italian World Cup winners Lippi and Cannavaro, and Brazil’s Luiz Felipe Scolari.

In 2020 the club began construction on a new $1.86 billion stadium that Evergrande Group said would have capacity for at least 80,000 fans.

The project was cancelled in 2022 as the group racked up $300 billion in liabilities.

The club were renamed Guangzhou FC in 2021 after new CFA rules forbid teams from including references to companies or sponsors in their names.

Guangzhou finished third in second-tier China League One in the 2024 season, missing out on promotion.

“We express our sincerest apologies to fans and everyone from all walks of life that have supported the club,” the club said in their statement on Monday.

China on Friday jailed former Premier League star and men’s national coach Li Tie for 20 years for bribery, snaring one of the country’s greatest football figures in a sweeping government crackdown on corruption in sport. President Xi Jinping has waged an unrelenting campaign against deep-seated official corruption since coming to power over a decade ago. Anti-graft authorities took aim at the sport industry in 2022 and have announced a string of convictions for former football administrators this week.

In the highest-profile case to date, a court in central Hubei province said Friday that Li had been sentenced to “fixed-term imprisonment of 20 years” after being found guilty of a string of offences relating to giving and receiving bribes.

The 47-year-old is one of China’s biggest football names, serving as national team coach from January 2020 to December 2021, after racking up nearly 100 international caps and playing as a midfielder for English Premier League side Everton.

But state broadcaster CCTV said he used his status as China coach to extract nearly 51 million yuan ($7 million) in bribes in return for selecting players for the national team or helping them sign for clubs.

Li also “asked others to help him” become the national coach in 2019 and handed the unnamed people one million yuan the following year, according to CCTV.

During his tenure at now-defunct Chinese Super League (CSL) side Wuhan Zall, Li also colluded with club chiefs to hand out bribes in an effort to secure the national team job, the broadcaster said.

It also listed other accusations that Li and his previous clubs had paid the equivalent of millions of dollars in bribes to seal player transfers and fix match results stretching back to 2015.

A photograph of Li published by CCTV showed the disgraced sportsman in the court dock, wearing a black hooded sweater and flanked by two police officers.

Televised confession

China’s legal system is tightly controlled by the ruling Communist Party and courts have a near-100 percent conviction rate in criminal cases.

Li’s conviction seemed certain after he pleaded guilty earlier this year to accepting over $10 million in bribes.

He also featured in a documentary aired by CCTV in January about widespread corruption in Chinese football.

CCTV occasionally airs confessions by criminal suspects before they have appeared in court, a practice widely condemned by rights groups.

In the programe, Li said he had arranged nearly $421,000 in bribes to secure the head coach position and helped fix CSL matches.

“I’m very sorry. I should have kept my head to the ground and followed the right path,” said Li during the show.

“There were certain things that at the time were common practices in football.”

String of convictions

Chinese authorities have announced a spate of corruption convictions this week, and state media said the sentencing of the former vice-chief of the national sport administration was also expected on Friday.

On Wednesday, Liu Yi, who was secretary general of the Chinese Football Association (CFA), was handed an 11-year sentence and fined 3.6 million yuan ($495,000) for taking bribes.

The same day, the former head of the CFA’s referees management office Tan Hai was given six and a half years and a 200,000-yuan fine for the same crime.

And on Tuesday, Qi Jun, the CFA’s ex-chief of strategic planning, was sentenced to seven years and slapped with a 600,000-yuan penalty.

Former CFA chief Chen Xuyuan was jailed for life in March for accepting bribes.

Proponents of Xi’s corruption crackdown say the policy promotes clean governance, but others say it also serves as a means for him to purge political rivals.

Xi is a self-proclaimed football fan who wants China to host and win the World Cup one day, but the men’s national team has long failed to impress.

FIFA currently ranks China 90th in the world, one place above the tiny Caribbean island of Curacao.