The first alarm rang in February, a warning from thousands of miles away.
Jiangsu Suning was one of the mainstays of that strange period, five or six years ago, when soccer awoke — almost overnight — to discover that China had arrived, its pockets bottomless and its ambitions unchecked, intent on inverting the world.
At first, Europe saw this new horizon as it sees everything: as a market. China’s corporate-backed clubs were, as Turkey’s and Russia’s had been years before, a convenience and a curiosity, a place where they could offload unwanted players from bloated squads.
And then, when the Chinese teams kept coming back, attempting to coax away not the supporting cast but the headline acts, Europe realized that this was something else: a takeover.