Guangzhou Evergrande's official website announced that in response to the new policy of the Football Association that all teams will be renamed neutral next season, the team decided to change its name to "Guangzhou Team". A stone stirs up a thousand waves, and for a time there are many opinions, and there is no consensus.
Before the first professional league in 1994, the teams in the top leagues A, the second division A and the second division, except for bayi and Lokomotiv, were basically named after provinces and cities. For example, the Liaoning team, the champion of the 1992 A, and the Dalian team of the FA Cup are the representatives of the name of the province and the city. At the beginning of the professional league, the biggest change is the injection of enterprises and funds, and there is the change of the team name. The Beijing team became the "Beijing Guoan Team", the Shanghai team became the "Shanghai Shenhua Team", the Shandong team became the "Shandong Luneng Team" and so on.
The company injected funds, and the name of the team joined the name of the enterprise, which played a good advertising effect. Quanxing Daqu became famous because of the title Sichuan team, and Shide Group became famous because of the title Dalian team, and such examples abound. But there are pros and cons, the title of the Shenzhen team has many twists and turns, Fiyta, Ping An, Jianlibao, Jinwei, Shangqing Drink, Red Diamond, Yuheng and Kaisa, before and after eight times to change the name, this name fans have not remembered, the new name is coming again. Frequently changing the name of the team, there is the helplessness of the company to withdraw, and there is also the inexplicable pain and heartache of the fans.
In 2018, in order to move closer to the top five European leagues at the forefront of the football league, the Football Association decided that all professional teams must change to neutral names in the 2021 season. In 2019, the Dalian team took the lead in using the new team name of "Dalian People", which caused mixed reviews for a while. Some fans complained that such a name change is too arbitrary, each team can add "people" after the name of the province and city, and the Chinese Super League is "Beijing people", "Shanghai people", "Henan people", "Hebei people" and so on.
Today, as soon as the new team name of Guangzhou Evergrande's "Guangzhou Team" came out, the controversy was even more serious. Don't say that football is round, the team name is back to the title before the professional league, the key is that Guangzhou Evergrande occupies the name of the Guangzhou team, what about Guangzhou R&F?