CHINESE demand for the world’s commodities may be sputtering, but not for the most vital ingredient of football: its players. In recent weeks, the country’s football clubs have been on their biggest ever spending spree, signing up foreign talent for sums which, by Asian standards, have been jaw-dropping. One local newspaper in China said anyone who paid attention to Chinese football would conclude that the clubs had “gone mad”.

Jiangsu Suning, a club owned by an eponymous retail chain, broke a record on January 27th when it paid £25m ($35m) for Ramires, a Brazilian midfielder (known only by his forename) who had been playing for Chelsea, an English team. That was the most an Asian club had spent on a footballer. Seven days later Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao took Jackson Martínez from Atlético Madrid, a big Spanish team, for $45m. Within a couple of days Jiangsu had smashed the record again, paying a Ukrainian team, Shakhtar Donetsk, $53m for Alex Teixeira, another Brazilian midfielder.

By the time China’s two-month-long winter transfer-period ends on February 26th, its top-division clubs will have spent a net amount of around $300m (the amount spent on buying players minus the amount received for selling them). That is more than the combined net outlay of all the clubs in Europe’s top five leagues during the winter period. The net spending of clubs in the English Premier League was the second highest ($220m); those in China’s second division ranked third, at $55m.

President Xi Jinping may be less inclined to call this mad. Oddly for someone with so much else to worry about, from reviving a slowing economy to fighting corruption, he has set much store by football. A year ago a committee charged with overseeing wide-ranging economic and social reforms turned its attention to an area of great concern in the football-loving nation: its dismal performance in the game. The committee, headed by Mr Xi, endorsed the Communist Party’s first ever plan for “football reforms” (with “Chinese characteristics”, naturally). These, it said, were aimed at ending the “backward” state of football in China and helping the country realise its “dream of sporting great-powerdom”. The plan says the number of football academies should increase tenfold to 50,000 by 2025. It decrees that football be made compulsory at school.

Football is particularly important for Mr Xi. He has been a fan since childhood. For a while after he took over as China’s leader his office, or at least the room said to be such in official photographs, featured the above picture of him as vice-president kicking a ball in Ireland. Mr Xi’s reform plan says football can help boost patriotism and a “collective spirit”—attributes Mr Xi is keen to inculcate in a society fractured by rapid economic change.

Chinese businesses are keen to play along. Four companies have taken over a first-division Chinese football club in the past two years. In October China Media Capital (CMC), a venture-capital firm, agreed to pay $1.3 billion for five years of television rights to the Chinese Super League (CSL), more than 25 times the amount paid by state television for the football season in 2015. (On February 23rd, the firm resold the first two years of rights at a 35% profit.) In December CMC bought a 13% stake in Manchester City, an English club, weeks after CMC’s chairman accompanied Mr Xi on a tour of the club’s facilities. Wang Jianlin, China’s richest man, recently snapped up a 20% stake in Atlético Madrid. Dalian Wanda, a firm owned by Mr Wang, is spending millions of dollars on the coaching of 180 Chinese players at world-class facilities in Spain.

Money talks

As well as signing up expensive foreign players, CSL clubs have been recruiting former managers of the English and Brazilian national teams. Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao employs dozens of coaches from Real Madrid to train the 3,000-odd youngsters enrolled at its academy. The drawback of working for a little-known team can be offset by a big pay-packet (Ezequiel Lavezzi, an Argentine forward from Paris St-Germain, a French team, recently joined a provincial squad in China for a reported salary of more than $300,000 a week). The CSL appears likely soon to eclipse Major League Soccer in America as a destination of choice for footballers who are more after money than prestige.

Mr Xi sees the game as a useful tool of diplomacy (his overseas visits often involve football-related events). But China’s league is still a long way from exerting the kind of soft power that the English Premier League bestows upon Britain (ask any taxi driver in China). Mr Xi has said he dreams of China winning the World Cup. England itself has no blueprint for that.