3) Jiangsu Suning
A club which is flaunting its wealth like there’s no tomorrow. It’s certainly not a new club. Far from it. It was in fact one of the founding members of the first top tier league in China in 1994, the Chinese Jia-A League.
The club was called Jiangsu Sainty until December 2015, after which it changed its suffix to Jiangsu Suning when it was acquired by Suning - the biggest electronics retailer in China. Within one month, it had set the transfer market afire by breaking its own transfer fee record twice in the same window, with a fee of £25 million paid for Ramires and later £37 million for fellow Brazilian Alex Teixeira (two of the 3 most costliest transfers of the winter window as mentioned right at the beginning of this article).
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The club also has Brazilian striker Jô on its books, the same one that once played for Manchester City and represented Brazil at the 2014 World Cup.
And from the looks of it, Jiangsu are far from being done with all their business. In January 2016, Chelsea were made a scarcely believable offer of £75million for the services of Brazilian playmaker Oscar, which they turned down.
In the meantime, if rumors are to be believed, Jiangsu are planning a move for unsettled Manchester City star Yaya Toure at the end of this season and are preparing a pay packet of an astonishing £30million-a-year to lure the Ivorian.
The club is in good shape of late, having won the Chinese FA Cup for the first time in 2015 and thereby gaining qualification to the 2016 AFC Champions League. It is currently leading the title race for the 2016 Chinese Super League as well.
Jiangsu has a 61,443 seater home stadium which is the Nanjing Olympic Sports Center which hosts matches which are well attended (average attendance figures of over 26000). They are managed by Romanian manager Dan Petrescu.
