And now, a tale of cultures coming together, of the meeting of East and West, of an admittedly quite boring shirt but an interesting provenance. All the way from China, it’s Chengdu Blades 2006-2008 home shirt!
Let’s start with the obvious: this isn’t an interesting football shirt, design-wise. I imagine it’s a barely-altered template kit from Umbro, with only the stitched-on white stripe and the badge stopping it from being just a red t-shirt. That said, one side of the shirt has neither a badge nor the white stripe, so I suppose it’s half a red t-shirt.
I’m glad I own this shirt for the history behind it, though. It’s a twisty-turny story that begins in 1996 with the formation of Chengdu Wuniu, a Chinese football team named after a brand of cigarettes. They started playing in the Chinese third tier, won a promotion and then in 2001 it all rather fell apart when they were busted for match fixing. It might be unfair, but the first thing I think of when I hear the phrase “Chinese football” is match fixing, and this isn’t doing much to change that perception.
Players and staff were banned, Chengdu were relegated as punishment. In 2002 they were reborn as Chengdu Taihe and proceeded to muddle along for a while. Then, in 2006, they were bought by Sheffield United.
Why? The reason was presumably to strengthen business ties and ultimately make money, but there was also the idea that the team would act as a feeder club from which Sheffield United could pluck talented players. And so it was that a small part of Yorkshire ended up in the Sichuan province of China. The team was renamed to Chengdu Blades to match Sheffield United’s nickname of The Blades, which even carried over to the new crossed-swords badge. The white rose of Yorkshire found on Sheffield United’s badge is replaced by a different flower, (possibly a plum blossom, but I’m no botanist,) which I think is a rather nice touch.
It all went swimmingly for a while. Chengdu Blades even managed to get promoted to the Chinese Super League in 2008. They are no longer in the Chinese Super League. Have a guess why. If you said “match fixing,” you’re both cynical and correct. Chengdu Blades were forcibly relegated once again in 2010 for the basic misdemeanour of paying their opponents to lose, and Sheffield United – who had been losing money over the partnership – sold their share of the club, perhaps glad that the controversy gave them a reason to pull the trigger.
Things get a little muddy after this. In 2013 the team became Chengdu Tiancheng FC, and now? They no longer exist. Closed up in 2015 by the Chinese FA because they weren’t paying their staff or players, probably because they’d spent all their money bribing their opponents. Thus ends the tale of Chengdu Blades: a story of skullduggery, Yorkshire ambition and at least one very dull home shirt.
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