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Shakhtar Donetsk always rather looked to be hoping to spark a bidding war for Alex Teixeira, and Chelsea or some other major European power entering into negotiations alongside Liverpool seemed the only realistic way for them to get their €50M asking price for a 26-year-old who had never been capped for his country.
They now appear to have have another bid for Teixeira, but it’s not one anybody expected. It’s from a Chinese club, at least according to Russian journalist Artur Petrosyan. The Chinese Super League has been in the news this month for football fans after Jiangsu Suning FC made a splash spending £25M to being in Chelsea midfielder Ramires.
It’s a move that showed just how much clubs in the Super League can spend—it would have been a challenge for Chelsea to find another club in football to pay half what they did for Ramires—but it also takes a player only interested in his paycheque to get a deal done. By all reports, this rules China out as a likely destination for Teixeira.
The Brazilian attacker has been desperate for a move to one of Europe’s bigger leagues as he enters the best years of his career, seeing it as the only route to a national team call up. Moving to China would amount to an acceptance that he would never play for his county, and given his public declarations in recent weeks this seems unlikely.