The departure of goal machine Wu Lei puts extra pressure on the broad shoulders of Brazilian striker Hulk as Shanghai SIPG kick off their Chinese Super League title defence on Friday.
The champions lost the league’s top-scorer to Espanyol in Spain during the off-season and have failed to replace him, despite being linked with West Ham’s Marko Arnautovic. SIPG will badly miss the Chinese international forward, who hit 27 goals in 29 games to fire them to their first major crown. But the club’s Portuguese coach Vitor Pereira, who masterminded the end of Guangzhou Evergrande’s seven-year reign as champions, is keen to move on.
“I believe that with hard work, team spirit and humility, and if you work as a team… as a family, we can achieve our goals and win more titles,” Pereira said on Wednesday.
He will be desperate to keep former international forward Hulk, 32, fit and firing. The skipper, who has 51 goals in 88 matches since arriving from Zenit St. Petersburg in 2016 for a reported $60 million, missed some of last year’s title run due to injury.
