Or holding hands with Saulo Mineiro, Shenhua wants to form a samba striker

Special correspondent Gan Hui reports On the evening of the 19th, the Chinese Football Association announced the 2025 season competition calendar, and the first transfer window of the 2025 Chinese Super League is planned to be from January 6 to February 18, 2025. Previously, all teams in the Chinese Super League were busy with access work, and at present, with most teams having passed the access barrier, the recruitment work will also become the main task of each team before winter training. For the Shanghai Shenhua team, it is almost certain that there will be new faces in the team when the holiday closes on January 6 next year. After follow-up observation and contact, Shenhua has basically finalized the team's new foreign player - Brazilian striker Saulo Mineiro from the Ceará club of the Brazilian Second League.

Saulo Mineiro was born on June 17, 1997, is 1.84 meters tall, weighs 74 kilograms, and has a right foot with a relatively fast main foot. Between July 2021 and August 2023, Saulo Mineiro played for J-League side Yokohama FC, scoring a total of 10 goals. In August 2023, Saulo Mineiro joined Ceará in the second division, making 30 league appearances, scoring 11 goals and providing six assists.

According to the German transfer, Saulo Mineiro is worth 900,000 euros. Compared with the big-name foreign aid of the "Golden Yuan Era", Shenhua fans will inevitably have a large gap. But for the Chinese Super League, the days of big fish and big meat are history, and coarse tea and light rice may become the mainstream. Even Vargas, who is currently the most expensive in the Chinese Super League, may choose to say goodbye to the harbor and go to Saudi Arabia to play because of the annual salary problem. In recent years, the relegation of foreign aid of various teams actually reflects the background of Chinese football's salary and investment restrictions and seeking steady, healthy and orderly development.

If Saulo Mineiro ends up holding hands with Shenhua, he will partner with Andre to form Shenhua's new forward samba combination. Andre is also from Brazil, and the cooperation of the two fellows may be more conducive to the formation of a good chemistry. Football needs individual heroes, but more importantly teams. If the team can be kneaded well, it may be possible to form a greater synergy and achieve better results.

A few days ago, at the 2024 China Football Development Seminar jointly sponsored by the "Football" newspaper and the Xi'an Sports Bureau, Gu Jiqing, chairman of Shenhua Club, said in a speech on the theme of "Summary of the Thoughts of 31-year-old second-year students", "State-owned assets do not mean that we can spend money lavishly, and our ability to regulate, restrain and tolerate faults is very limited, so management efficiency is a very important issue." "Bidding farewell to large-scale recruitment, introducing affordable foreign aid, and seeking efficiency from management may become the development path of Chinese professional football clubs in the future.

Of course, the transfer window for the new season of the Chinese Super League has not yet opened, so there are still certain variables in the Shenhua deal. In more than half a month, Shenhua will end the winter break, regroup at the Shanghai Jiushi Kangqiao Sports Base, and plan to go to Haikou on January 9 to start less than three weeks of winter training to prepare for the new 2025 season.