Didier Drogba was told once that in China they considered him to be a reincarnation of an ancient god. They called him “The Almighty” and he always remembers the reaction on his first training session after following Nicolas Anelka to the bags of gold at Shanghai Shenhua. Their new colleagues would “just stare in wide-eyed amazement at some of our moves, what we did in practice, how we played within a team”. Both players were drifting towards the end of their playing careers, but they were still vastly superior to all their team-mates.

Which is probably what you would expect given that China’s solitary appearance in a World Cup came in 2002, losing all three games without scoring a single goal, and we are talking about the nation that is 83rd in Fifa’s latest world rankings, directly below Antigua and Barbuda and one above the Faroe Islands, whose combined population could fit into any Shanghai suburb with room to spare.

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It is certainly easy to understand why, after Graziano Pellè signed for Shandong Luneng, one football magazine carried a spoof interview from the Italian expressing his joy to be joining “what I presume to be a football club in China or thereabouts”. Pellè will apparently earn £34m in two and a half years, which breaks down to £260,000 a week, reputedly putting him in the top five best-paid footballers in the world, while leaving the firm impression that whoever runs Shandong hadn’t noticed the second L in his surname.

Remember when Juninho joined Middlesbrough back in the 1990s in one of those transfers that seemed to shape English football? “Juninho will need to learn only three words of English: pound, thank you and bye‑bye,” Jan Aage Fjortoft, one of his new team-mates, said at the time. It is the same now in China and it did raise a smile when Ramires, on his way out of Chelsea earlier this year, insisted the huge financial incentives had not underpinned his transfer to the Chinese Super League. No, presumably every young boy from Rio de Janeiro grows up dreaming of playing for Jiangsu Suning, in the nation that has just lost a World Cup qualifier at home to Syria – a country, you might imagine, that has other things on its mind than putting out a football team.

Oscar, an increasingly peripheral figure at Chelsea, is the latest to be tempted and, however much his impending £60m transfer to Shanghai SIPG is dressed up, it is difficult not to think it deeply unsatisfying to see someone of his age abandoning any real sense of ambition and, without wishing to be too cruel, a certain amount of respectability. At 25, he is approaching what should be the greatest years of his career, even if it seems apparent they will not be with his current club. He is also exceedingly rich already, most people would assume, after four and a half years on Chelsea’s payroll, and surely talented enough to attract potential buyers from Europe’s top leagues. Good luck to him, I suppose, but however many noughts are added to his salary, I do wonder how much job satisfaction there can be for a footballer with his gifts at a level several rungs down even from Major League Soccer.

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If that sounds slightly harsh, the reality is we are probably just going to have to get used to players heading that way, judging by the mind-boggling amounts on offer, and presumably it won’t be too long before a high‑profile English footballer is added to the number.

Wayne Rooney has already had one offer and, though it didn’t get very far at all, he hasn’t completely ruled out the idea of China even if, money aside, he hasn’t heard too much that is appealing. Rooney’s advisers went on a fact‑finding mission to China last spring and reported back that the pitches were appalling, the standard as bad as everyone thought, and the referees even worse, in a league blackened by tales of match-fixing and bribery.

Rooney might also remember Manchester United’s pre-season friendly against FC Shenzhen in Macau in 2007 and what came out, four years later, about the referee taking 100,000 Hong Kong dollars (roughly £8,000) to fix the coin toss. Yet the key detail is what a climb-down it would be, football-wise, for someone whose career has been spent at the high end of the Premier League. The money is sensational but, to remember the old Rodriguez song, a monkey in silk is still a monkey.

The difference between Rooney and Oscar is that one is skidding towards the end of a rapidly decelerating career whereas the other should be five or six years away from the point where he might be thinking about one last payday. That is the shame of it all, why Jamie Carragher has called it embarrassing and why, unless there is a late change of heart, it feels like such a waste that a super-rich footballer would follow the yuan rather than stay in Europe and play in the competitions that really matter to the people in his profession.

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Yaya Touré is often accused of being driven by ego and money – mostly, it ought to be said, because of a particularly dislikable agent, rather than the player himself – but it is not widely known the Manchester City midfielder turned his back on one offer from China last summer that would have earned him, after tax, £360,000 per week. Touré simply decided he was already an extremely wealthy man, that he would earn huge wages anyway and that, at the age of 33, he still wanted to be involved in a competitive league rather than one where its star imports counted their dosh but, in sporting terms, found little satisfaction.

Rio Ferdinand was the same when he left Manchester United and had money-spinning offers from teams in China, the Gulf and the United States. He opted for QPR and hopefully Alexis Sánchez will also decide that life in London is preferable for a category-A footballer now he is a target of China. Sánchez could feasibly earn £400,000 a week but it would be disappointing, in the extreme, if it turns out we have misjudged him and he decides the higher salary would be better for him, career-wise, than earning millions with Arsenal instead.

To give him his due, there is nothing to suggest that is the case, but not everyone thinks the same, plainly. Alex Teixiera could have moved to Liverpool before pitching up at Jiangsu Suning. Gervinho, Ezequiel Lavezzi, Demba Ba, Papiss Cissé, Jackson Martínez and Hulk all now play in the country where Paul Gascoigne once had a two-week trial at one club – “The name escapes me now,” he wrote, rather brilliantly, in his autobiography – and a brief spell at Gansu Tianma.

In Oscar’s case, he has clearly been shunted to the edges at Chelsea since Antonio Conte took control, and the natural comeback in these kind of debates is to ask how many people in any walk of life would say no to trebling their wages – for the Brazilian, increasing his salary to £350,000 a week.

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All the same, Arsène Wenger made a good point recently, discussing Arsenal’s contract negotiations with Sanchez, when he said the Premier League’s top players were hardly on a pittance anyway and needed to be careful about getting their priorities in the wrong order. “I believe personally, and maybe I am a bit naive, that it’s more about getting to meet the player’s needs … the way the club has values, the way the club has ambition, the way the club respects the players,” Wenger said. “The money is good everywhere for everybody.”

Maybe I am a bit naive, too, but I cannot help agree. Oscar is too good for China. It is no place for any footballer with genuine ambition and surely, if he has to leave Chelsea, he could find another club that allows him to be a multimillionaire, with everything done for him and all the superstar’s accessories, in a country where the sport is not a national embarrassment.

China’s defeat to Syria in October finished with swarms of people protesting on the streets, just as they did in 2013 after the national team lost 5-1 against a Thai youth side and their Spanish coach, José Antonio Camacho, resigned in disgrace. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has made it clear he wants to start the country’s rise as a football power, meaning the sport is now a compulsory part of the national curriculum and tens of thousands of new pitches are being created, but it will take many years before they catch up. The wages are out of this world but they probably have to be because any top-level player heading to China might just find this is the point when the rest of football stops taking their careers seriously.

Clarke redefining transparency

Greg Clarke, chairman of the Football Association, did not make any attempt to downplay the seriousness of the child sexual-abuse scandal and the potential repercussions for the relevant clubs and, indeed, his own organisation. Everybody at the FA knew the importance of getting this one right, he said. “It’s certainly the biggest crisis I can remember and we’re trying to be completely transparent.”

Clarke was formerly the chairman of the Football League and you might remember him promising transparency back then, too. “I have a propensity to think that transparency is a wonderful thing,” he said. “When you see countries and companies who are not transparent, terrible things happen.”

Absolutely. And now here he was again, in his new role, promising everything would be out in the open and the FA, conducting its own inquiry, would keep us all in touch. “We will bring information to the public domain as quickly as possible,” he added, reassuringly.

Except this was 29 November and, as we know now, four days earlier the FA suspended Dario Gradi, director of football at Crewe Alexandra, from all football-related activities. Clarke, promising transparency and an open line of information, had stood in front of the television cameras and somehow failed to mention it once.

On 6 December I wrote that the FA intended to interview Gradi about what he knew and, before and after publication, had several conversations with the governing body. Again, no mention was made that Gradi, by that stage, was 11 days into his suspension. In fact, the FA still hasn’t uttered a word on the subject – not even a one-line confirmation – despite it being reported everywhere and even though Crewe, possibly the least transparent club I have ever dealt with, have put out a brief statement.

Is this the FA’s idea of transparency? It feels more like a deliberate attempt to hush everything up, which is precisely what the FA promised it would not do. Perhaps Clarke thought nobody would notice when Gradi stopped turning up for matches but more fool us, I suppose, if we were daft enough to believe the FA might actually mean it this time.

For the time being, it feels about as transparent as a pint of Guinness and, on a similar theme, it would be appreciated if the FA could be good enough to explain what a suspension from all football‑related activities actually entails. Sorry to be pedantic, but it does feel like a relevant question when the man who has supposedly been told to keep away from the sport is filmed going in and out of his club’s ground.

Rowett’s swings and roundabouts

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Gary Rowett has had a lot of sympathy, understandably, over the last few days, bearing in mind the nature of his sacking at Birmingham City and the announcement of Gianfranco Zola’s appointment with barely enough time in between for the last man to clear out his office.

It is a cut-throat business and, not for the first time, it makes me wonder whether the League Managers Association, so quick to criticise clubs for the speed at which they hire and fire, should remember its own members can be pretty ruthless, too.

At the same time, it is probably worth pointing out that when José Riga was at Blackpool, already suffering the excesses of the club’s ownership, Rowett not only spoke to the Oyston family about nabbing his job but also cheerfully announced as much on the website of Burton Albion, his club at the time.

That was the first time Riga found out that interviews were taking place for a job he had not even vacated. Rowett, one imagines, might understand a little better now that it is a shame some of the people in his profession don’t bother too much with managerial etiquette.