Hui Ka-yan, the former chairman and controlling shareholder of China Evergrande Group, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court on Thursday for multiple offenses, marking a definitive end to his once-expansive sports empire that paralleled the collapse of his real estate conglomerate.

Hui’s entry into professional sports began in 2010 with the acquisition of a demoted football club for 100 million yuan (HK$116.6 million). He set ambitious goals to secure the Chinese Super League (CSL) title within three years and an AFC Champions League championship within five. Initially, these promises were fulfilled as the club, later known as Guangzhou FC, won eight CSL championships and two AFC Champions League titles. The team also competed on the international stage, facing European powerhouses such as Bayern Munich and Barcelona at the FIFA Club World Cup, providing a rare boost in enthusiasm and credibility for Chinese football at a time when the sport struggled nationally.

The club’s success was supported by significant investment in high-profile managers like Marcelo Lippi and foreign players including Brazil’s Paulinho and Argentina’s Dario Conca. This spending contributed to raising the competitiveness and commercial appeal of domestic football in China and throughout Asia.

However, this sports success was underpinned by the financial strength of Evergrande’s heavily indebted real estate business. The Chinese government’s debt control measures introduced in August 2020, known as the "three red lines" policy, subjected Evergrande to intense liquidity constraints, exposing the vulnerabilities of its leveraged model.

Financial troubles extended to the football club, which began delaying player wages by late 2021. A former player reported unpaid salaries amounting to 2.6 million yuan between September 2021 and April 2022. The club failed to secure the CSL title that year for the first time in over a decade, prompting a mass exodus of top players. By the 2022 season, the team’s roster was largely composed of under-22 domestic academy players, with no foreign signings, and was rebranded as Guangzhou FC under government-mandated neutral naming policies.

Guangzhou FC’s performance suffered, culminating in relegation to China League One after finishing second-to-last in the CSL. Facing mounting debts—including unpaid wages to notable domestic players and a 1 million euro claim from former manager Fabio Cannavaro—the club declared its dissolution in January 2023 following exclusion from the Chinese Football Association's league entry list. The team’s training facilities in Panyu subsequently received eviction notices for unpaid rent and now lie mostly unused.

Hui’s broader sporting ambitions included constructing the Evergrande Football Stadium, a planned 100,000-seat venue in Panyu valued at 12 billion yuan, envisioned as the world’s largest football stadium. Construction stalled in 2021, and the land rights were returned to local authorities in August 2022, with Evergrande incurring a 1.25 billion yuan loss. The project has since been taken over by the state-owned Guangzhou City Construction Investment Group, which plans to complete a downsized 75,000-seat facility, renamed “Yu Linglong,” by the end of this year.

Despite the collapse of the professional teams, some aspects of Hui’s sports initiatives remain operational. The Evergrande Football School in Qingyuan, Guangdong, continues to produce youth talent, claiming over 1,000 national team call-ups over 14 years, including 210 in 2025 alone. Several academy graduates have progressed to first-team roles within the CSL.

Beyond football, Hui also invested in other sports ventures. In 2009, he founded the Guangdong Evergrande Women’s Volleyball Club, China’s first fully corporate-funded professional volleyball team, which achieved domestic success under coach Lang Ping before the company shifted its focus toward football. The group also supported events in dragon boat racing, open-water swimming, and table tennis, sponsoring the ITTF Men’s World Tour.

While Hui Ka-yan’s sporting empire has largely collapsed alongside Evergrande’s financial troubles, some institutional legacies, particularly in youth development, continue to operate under new conditions.