To commemorate the Chinese New Year teams across Europe have been featuring player names in Chinese on their shirts, and Barcelona have become the latest club to announce their intention to do so in this week’s El Clasico.
The first of three Clasico encounters in just over three weeks takes place on Wednesday night, and Barcelona will wear unique shirts in the match, which will have the player names with Chinese characters just below the regular names. This is the first time that the Club has added new characters on the back of the shirt.
Also known as the Spring Festival, this traditional festival is the most important of the year in the Chinese calendar, which in 2019 marks the Year of the Pig. This year is also an important one for the strategy of establishment of Barça in China, which will experience its most important moment next summer when the first team will visit China and Japan on their preseason tour.
The cynical out there may say that Barca got the idea after Valencia did exactly the same thing in their game on 2 February against the Catalan giants. We’re not saying that… just, y’know, some people might…
Of course, Valencia are not the first to do this either though. Chinese owned Inter Milan have been doing it for the last couple of years and they did it again this weekend in their match against Bologna, however they go the whole hog and replace the name with Mandarin.
PSG, the trailblazers and trendsetters that they are, also featured Chinese names on their shirts last year. Although it’s currently unknown if they’ll wear them on pitch again this year, the club have made them available for purchase.
Celebrate the year of the Pig with your favourite player name in Chinese. Why not.
