That is the first impression that surfaces in my mind when I recall the performance of the city's two Division A soccer clubs, Shenhua SVA and Cosco Huili, since league play resumed after the World Cup.

The league's runner-up last year, Shenhua has so far lost four matches consecutively, and Cosco is no better than its crosstown peer as it swallowed five losses in six matches in a month.

One of the immediate consequences of this awkward performance is the sacking of Shenhua's coach Xu Genbao, a controversial public figure in the Chinese football community, and I don't know what awaits Cosco's coach, Frenchman Claude Le Roy, if his team continues to play in the same way.

Even Tang Meng, a famous sports programme commentator at a local TV station, strangely became a victim. Tang recently aired his gripes in Sports Weekly that he was transferred to host other matches instead of Shenhua's because his commentary was believed by "concerned parties" as a kind of "evil spell" leading to Shenhua's clumsy performance.

Taking Tang's experience as a funny anecdote, people have started trying to find out the reasons behind Shanghai football's decline these days: incapable coach, out-of-best-form players, inappropriate strategies on the pitch...

Yet in my eyes, the root reason for the current situation is the lack of management professionals that understand football well and know how to run the sport based on a long-term perspective targeting sustainable development.

Like most of their domestic peers, the two local clubs seem at present heavily tainted with a kind of utilitarianism that reflects the ambitiousness of the enterprises behind them, respectively Shanghai SVA Group and COSCO Group.

Rather than a healthy, self-supported and independent entity, the clubs are just like some auxiliary possessions of the enterprises.

In that regard, the enterprises would pour a huge sum of money to usher in whatever they think valuable and, perhaps more importantly, eye-catching players and coaches, with little consideration of their form, sustainable potential and possible help to the whole team's overall strength improvement.

Given such a short-sighted philosophy to operate football, few can expect too much out of the clubs and their teams, and their recent doldrums, I believe, are just the beginning of a longer nightmare, if the behind-the-curtain enterprises fail to correct their way of running the sport.

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