Media person: Although the CBA does not allow signing fees, the fact is that the signing fees have rekindled in the past two years.

August 3rd News Today, media person Fu Zhenghao talked about Zeng Fanbo's signing of the Nets on social media.

Fu Zhenghao's original text on Weibo is as follows:

US media revealed that Zeng Fanbo signed an Exhibit 10 contract with the Nets, which is consistent with the revelations at the end of June. The Exhibit 10 contract is a non-guaranteed training camp invitation contract in the annex to the NBA's labor and capital agreement. The team can decide whether to convert it into a double-choice contract based on their performance. Although the contract income is not high and there is not much security, it is still an opportunity to hit the NBA gate.

At present, the new leadership team of the Chinese Basketball Association has doubts about whether the CBA can cultivate high-quality national players. The Basketball Association is also discussing a package of policies to find ways to encourage young players to go out. Yang Hansen was selected in the 16th pick in the first round this year, which has inspired a group of young players to be firmly confident in going out. These young players with high spirits feel that they can also play in the NBA, but they just lack an excellent operation team and an opportunity.

Sometimes I really feel that Chinese basketball seems to have fallen into a vicious circle of repeated adjustments in the relationship between the CBA league and the national team. Every time the leadership of the Basketball Association changes, it will adjust its governance ideas around whether the CBA can train and provide qualified national players to the national team.

After the establishment of the Basketball Management Center in 1997, it organized all parties to discuss the benign interactive relationship between the national team and the league. Under ideal conditions, the CBA and the national team are benign interactive. Theoretically, as the CBA league grows, more and more stars are trained, and the national team's performance is getting better and better. But in fact, it is far from as perfect as ideal.

After the 2002 Chinese men's basketball team failed to return in the World Championships and Asian Games, Director Xin Lancheng began to doubt whether the CBA league can continue to train international stars. After all, whether it is Wang Zhizhi, Yao Ming, Batel's "China Mobile Great Wall" or the 96 Golden Generation led by Hu Weidong, Liu Yudong, Gong Xiaobin and Sun Jun, they are all tempered in three-from-one system, and they are all discovered before the establishment of the professional league. However, he was transferred from the basketball management center due to the failure of the 2002 Men's Basketball Asian Games and was seconded to the Sports Department of the 2008 Olympic Organizing Committee.

Later, Director Daxin returned to the Basketball Management Center in 2009, further doubting the sustainability of the CBA's training of national players. Therefore, he reorganized the Youth Department of the Basketball Management Center and tilted more resources to the national youth team. Guo Ailun, Zhou Qi, and Zhao Jiwei were trained in a key role. Zhou Qi, Zhao Jiwei, Gao Shang and others achieved the seventh place in the World Youth Championship, which had the best results in history in 2013, was once quite exciting.

When Director Li Yuanwei served as director of the Basketball Management Center from 2003 to 2008, he was full of confidence in the professionalization of the CBA and formulated the "Polaris Plan" to guide the direction of the professionalization reform of the league. He took the NBA as a reference and determined that if the CBA can develop well, it will continue to cultivate more talents for the national team. Fortunately, the existence of superstars such as Yao Ming, Wang Zhizhi, and Yi Jianlian also ensured the national team's performance. The excellent results of the national team created a relatively relaxed external environment for the reform of the CBA league.

Directors Xin and Li obviously have different cognitions and understandings about whether the CBA can continue to provide high-quality talents to the national team, so their importance to the professionalization of the CBA is also different, which has become a hot topic that the outside world has been hotly discussed in those years, and even forcibly opposing the two, which makes people laugh and cry. Essentially, both of these basketball management center directors have to prioritize national team performance in the end.

After Yao Ming became the head of the Basketball Association in 2017, his philosophy was closer to Director Li. Some of the people who valued it were also members of the Polaris Plan that year. Everyone has similar ideas and believes that the CBA can replicate the NBA model. So we began to vigorously promote the separation of CBA management and office, set up a CBA company to be responsible for league operations, and proposed the CBA2.0 strategy based on the NBA operation model, committed to allowing investors to lose as little as possible and make the CBA sustainable development. We firmly believe that the sustainable development of the CBA will benefit the national team.

But unfortunately, during Yao Ming's tenure, the Chinese men's basketball team missed two consecutive Olympics, and the continued decline in national team performance has caused more doubts and resistance to CBA reform.

When Director Li was in power, the existence of superstars such as Yao Ming ensured that he would be among the top eight in the consecutive Olympics, which created a relatively relaxed environment for his CBA reform. When Yao Ming became the head of the Basketball Association, there was no second Yao Ming who could help him stabilize the national team's performance, which eventually led to the failure of the CBA 2.0 strategy, and no one mentioned it again since 2022. At the end of 2022, Yao Ming also began to change his words after being re-elected as the head of the 10th Basketball Association, demanding that the league make way for the national team. In October 2024, Yao Ming officially resigned.

As Yi Jianlian grows older and his national team's performance falls to a low point, the quality of local CBA stars is getting worse and worse, and more people voted distrust of whether the CBA can train qualified national players. The Basketball Association has also begun to study various support strategies to promote young players to study abroad. For example, it stipulates that CBA players must continue to fulfill their contracts with their parent team after returning from the NBA, and try to reduce the concerns of the club when they release people out.

At the same time, the decline in national team performance has also affected the reputation of Chinese basketball and the business development of CBA, and the CBA salary standard has also declined. For example, the maximum salary of CBA players has dropped from 8 million before tax to 6 million, and it is likely to continue to decrease in the future. In contrast, the salary of NBA players is rising sharply, which has also forced CBA players out of their comfort zone to a certain extent.

In this context, those young and talented young men also want to go out and are willing to sacrifice short-term immediate gains in exchange for improvement in football skills, and then earn high returns in the future by signing endorsement contracts and possible NBA opportunities. Even if you cannot gain a foothold in the NBA for a long time, you can still get a considerable signing fee when you return to the CBA.

Although the CBA explicitly stipulates that no form of signing fees is allowed, the fact is that the CBA signing fees have rekindled and even become more and more intense in the past two years.. For those stars who go to overseas leagues to practice, getting the signing fee when signing a new contract after they return is also a disguised incentive.