Zenit St Petersburg’s Brazilian international Hulk arrived in Shanghai Wednesday to sign for Sven-Goran Eriksson’s Shanghai SIPG team, as the cash-flush Chinese Super League embarks on a new round of transfer spending.
A horde of cheering red-shirted fans mobbed the 29-year-old at Shanghai airport as he made his way through the arrivals halls carrying two bouquets of flowers.
Russian media have said Zenit would be paid around 55 million euros (dh 223 million, $61 million) for his services. But according to posts on China’s Twitter-like Weibo, SIPG’s general manager Sui Guoyang has said the figure was “not that high”.
The National’s Transfer Talk page
Website transfermarkt, which tracks dealings in the sport, put the fee at 58 million euros (dh 236 million).
SIPG said on a verified Weibo account the “Incredible Hulk” would undergo a medical on Thursday, after which he would be officially signed, with a press conference to follow later.
The deal could break the Asian transfer record of 50 million euros (dh 203 million), paid by Jiangsu Suning for Shakhtar Donetsk’s Alex Teixeira earlier this year in China’s world-leading transfer splurge.
President Xi Jinping has ambitions to make the Asian giant a footballing power. During the winter transfer window in January and February, Chinese teams broke the Asian transfer record four times in an acquisition spree that outstripped even the mega-rich English Premier League.
But the big spending did not pay off for all of them. Guangzhou Evergrande and Jiangsu Suning flopped in the regional AFC Champions League, a route to a coveted Fifa Club World Cup spot, while Shanghai SIPG are through to the quarter-finals.
Because Shanghai SIPG already have the maximum five foreign players, Hulk’s arrival would mean one would have to leave the club.
Shanghai SIPG are fourth in the Chinese Super League table but have struggled in recent matches and are winless in five games.
On Saturday they could only manage a 1-1 draw at home to mid-ranked Tianjin Teda.
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'Skin'
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Amira Sakalla
Iran's dirty tricks to dodge sanctions
There’s increased scrutiny on the tricks being used to keep commodities flowing to and from blacklisted countries. Here’s a description of how some work.
1 Going Dark
A common method to transport Iranian oil with stealth is to turn off the Automatic Identification System, an electronic device that pinpoints a ship’s location. Known as going dark, a vessel flicks the switch before berthing and typically reappears days later, masking the location of its load or discharge port.
2. Ship-to-Ship Transfers
A first vessel will take its clandestine cargo away from the country in question before transferring it to a waiting ship, all of this happening out of sight. The vessels will then sail in different directions. For about a third of Iranian exports, more than one tanker typically handles a load before it’s delivered to its final destination, analysts say.
3. Fake Destinations
Signaling the wrong destination to load or unload is another technique. Ships that intend to take cargo from Iran may indicate their loading ports in sanction-free places like Iraq. Ships can keep changing their destinations and end up not berthing at any of them.
4. Rebranded Barrels
Iranian barrels can also be rebranded as oil from a nation free from sanctions such as Iraq. The countries share fields along their border and the crude has similar characteristics. Oil from these deposits can be trucked out to another port and documents forged to hide Iran as the origin.
* Bloomberg
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