Football stadium bigger than Wembley left half-finished with cranes abandoned

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    A football stadium which was due to be bigger than Wembley was left half-finished with cranes abandoned.

    Chinese Super League side Guangzhou Evergrande, now known simply as Guangzhou FC, drew the attention of fans across the world when they announced plans for their new ground.

    The initial designs pictured a grand Lotus-shaped structure which had a proposed capacity of 100,000.

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    Not only would that beat the 90,000 that the home of English football can hold, but it would also surpass Barcelona's Camp Nou as the largest football-specific stadium in the world.

    However, The Evergrande Group, one of China's largest property developers and owners of the club, has since become riddled with debt.

    They are at the centre of a real estate crisis with debts in the country's sector totalling an estimated £86billion ($117bn).

    Evergrande themselves have a massive £220b ($300bn) in liabilities, as per The Sun.

    And that forced them to stop construction of their new 'Lotus Flower Stadium' last year because they simply had no cash to spend.

    It was left part-filled with seats and the cranes that had been used to work on it were left on site with no builders to man them.

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    The stadium, or what there is of it, was set to be auctioned off.

    But the Chinese government stepped in last December to take it off Evergrande's hands.

    While it is a sorry story, it is the tip of the iceberg of a major crisis in one of the world's super powers.

    Thousands of other constructions schemes have been halted too after the Chinese president cracked down on the debt which property companies were building.

    Evergrande have an estimated 1.5million unfinished houses they need to build, and their dreams of having football's grandest home are firmly down the drain.

    • China
    • FIFA

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