AFP, Tokyo :
After making a splash on the tiny, honeymoon island of Guam, English coach Gary White is already proving a hit in the cut-throat world of Chinese football.
The 42-year-old, who left the palm-fringed Pacific island to manage Shanghai Shenxin earlier this year, has his eye on winning promotion to the Chinese Super League next season after saving the team from relegation.
“I came in June and the club was basically in free-fall,” White told AFP in a telephone interview. “Now there will be pressure to go up.”
White, who formerly played for English non-league club Bognor Regis, began coaching in 1998 when he was living on a council estate in Luton, north of London, and faxed every national association in the world looking for work.
Following spells with the British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas before Guam, he arrived in Shanghai, where he was forced to plunder the reserves after being told there was no money in the transfer kitty.
“I got rid of a lot of dead wood and made some tough decisions,” he said, after guiding his side to a top-10 finish in China’s first division, one below the Super League. “The first thing I had to do was get the players to think more positively because they didn’t have much belief, there was no motivation,” added White. “It’s been a lot of hard work: getting to know the players, taking them for coffee to find out what makes them tick.”
White led all three national sides he has coached to their highest FIFA ranking. But at Shanghai he faces a battle to keep his best players out of the clutches of richer clubs.
“Most clubs in China are just teams where somebody’s gone to the supermarket and bought the best ingredients,” he said, referring to the Chinese game’s eye-watering spending power.
“There’s so much money in China, they can get any player they want. A lot of the bigger clubs are short-term thinkers.”
“Shenxin is a long-term thinking club,” added White, whose billionaire chairman Xu Guoliang owns a gold mine.
“A lot of the players in the first team have come through the academy system. They try to give kids a chance.”
With Chinese clubs outspending their English Premier League rivals in this year’s winter transfer window, top targets such as Jackson Martinez, Alex Teixeira, Ramires and Hulk are increasingly accepting lucrative offers from China.
