Chinese investment trend could see Guochuan Lai leave West Brom – Finance Expert
We’re delighted to welcome football finance expert Dr Daniel Plumley as our exclusive West Brom columnist. Each week he’ll be giving his views on the biggest talking points at The Hawthorns...
Dan Plumley insists a Chinese investment trend could lead to Guochuan Lai packing his bags and leaving West Brom sooner rather than later.
Chinese football expert, Mark Dreyer predicted earlier in March that Lai could be the next to go with influence from that part of the world dropping significantly.
Plumley agreed with that prediction and as Chinese ownership and investment drop, influence from the Middle East and America continues to rise.
“We’ve seen with that particular part of the world, we’ve seen that linked to the government policy more than anything,” he exclusively told West Brom News.
“There was a big push on football investment from the government five, six, seven years ago where they were trying to build a Chinese World Cup team that could win it by 2050, that was a lot coming from the country and there was a lot of investment off the back of that.
“Then the policies changed and they’ve almost been told to withdraw some of that investment so we’ve seen exits across the European game.
“I think it is a realistic possibility that he [Lai] would leave anyway given the situation at West Brom, but that government policy and what we’ve seen from that type of investor seems to be the trend to depart football now.
“As you say, that’s been overtaken by much more investment from America and the Middle East, so it seems to be that Chinese interest wider in football at the minute is kind of on the wain a little bit.”
In other West Brom news, the Albion would love to re-sign their £6m former player, but would need to secure promotion to the Premier League to do so