Since the founding of the CSL in 2004, there have only been four locals given the league's Best Coach of the Year Award. Ma Lin was the most recent Chinese coach to be given the award, in 2011.

Things don't look much better at present for local talent on the pitch. Wu Lei of Shanghai SIPG was the only homegrown player to take second place in the top 20 scorers' list in the 2017 CSL season.

Of the eight coaches to have won the CSL trophy, only two were Chinese. Zhu Guanghu of Shenzhen Jianlibao won the first CSL title in 2004, and Gao Hongbo of Yatai took the title in 2007.

The state of the CSL at present speaks to a brutal fact: there is little chance for local coaches to shine in the league. The talent pool of Chinese coaches is small enough as is, and the problems are only compounded by the tendency of clubs to look abroad for leadership. Only clubs on the bottom half of the table routinely appoint Chinese coaches.

Take the CSL 2017 season as an example. Only three out of 16 teams at the beginning employed Chinese coaches. These were replaced by foreign coaches midway through the season, and four Chinese coaches took caretaker positions by the end of the season. Ironically, Chinese coaches are always deemed the best choices for caretaker roles.

In the past several years, Chinese football has undeniably been gaining the world's attention. While many CSL clubs spend big on foreign strikers and attacking midfielders, performance (both of the clubs themselves and of China men' s national team) remains at a low level. Chinese sports officials have come to realize that performance is limited by the standard of the local Chinese players, who form the core of national squads.

In an effort to develop Chinese football, the CFA acted to prevent Chinese players from getting squeezed out, demanding the clubs to field more U23 players on the pitch to support local talents.

China's football governing body in May also ruled that any club spending cash on foreign players must pay the same sum of money to a football development fund as a tax for making such hires.

While challenges remain, it is clear that the league intends to raise its standards to avoid becoming a "retirement league" for older foreign players. One recent example of the changes saw Brazilian midfielder Paulinho leave Guangzhou Evergrande to return to Barcelona.