Fabio Cannavaro's future at Guangzhou Evergrande is in doubt after the Chinese Super League giant announced a management restructure that appears to strip the Italian head coach of any meaningful power at the club.

At the end of a season in which Evergrande relinquished the CSL title to Jiangsu Suning and crashed out of the AFC Champions League at the group stage, the club has installed veteran midfielder Zheng Zhi as general manager－replacing Gao Han.

Evergrande said Zheng will now have the "main responsibility" for the team－which is believed to extend to player recruitment－instead of the head coach. The move has been interpreted as an attempt to force Cannavaro's resignation.

"The club has decided to change Evergrande's management model from allowing the head coach to take the main responsibility under the club's chairman (Xu Jiayin) to giving a general manager the main responsibility under the chairman," read an Evergrande statement.

The reshuffle adds to 40-year-old Zheng's already sizable workload, given that he is also the team's captain and assists coach.

No mention was made of Cannavaro in the statement. Firing him would be an expensive option for Evergrande, who would have to pay the remainder of the 2006 World Cup winner's contract, which expires in 2022 and is thought to be worth around $12 million per year.

Eight-time CSL champion Evergande has dominated Chinese soccer for the past decade, with trophies a must to ensure any coach's survival at the club.

Evergrande boasts one of the league's biggest budgets and a glittering array of foreign and domestic talent, including former Barcelona midfielder Paulinho, homegrown hotshot Wei Shihao and Brazil-born naturalized star Ai Kesen (aka Elkeson). The failures of the 2020 season have, therefore, been difficult to digest for fans.

"The public interpreted the club's announcement as its intention to strip Cannavaro of power and force him to resign voluntarily. After all, paying huge compensation would not be desirable for Evergrande," read a commentary from Guangzhou Daily.

"If Cannavaro does not resign, he will still probably lose actual control of the team, making him a figurehead at the club.... It has been a season of failure for Evergrande and the coming campaign could be even more unpredictable."

Cannavaro is in his second stint at Evergrande, having been reappointed in 2017 following a short-lived spell from 2014-15 when he was abruptly replaced by Luiz Felipe Scolari.

Once again, Cannavaro has endured a bumpy, unpredictable ride in the Evergrande hot seat. Last year he was temporarily relieved of his duties "to attend a study class on Evergrande's corporate culture" following a slump in form en route to winning the 2019 CSL title. In the season just passed, Cannavaro's job was made considerably more difficult by injuries to Brazilian midfield general Paulinho and veteran defender Zhang Linpeng, who sustained a right-foot problem in a Nov 25 Champions League game against Japan's Vissel Kobe.

"We failed to defend the CSL title, which was a big pity," said Paulinho on his personal Weibo account. "And my injuries denied me the chance to keep fighting for our club.

"My left leg has been injured since early this year, so I often had to skip training sessions and take painkillers to finish matches. This was very frustrating.

"The team and my personal doctors all told me to have systematic treatment or else it will affect the rest of my career. That's why after discussions with the head coach and the club, I decided to not play in the AFC Champions League."

Considering Paulinho's woes and the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic-shortened season, former China international Peng Weiguo reckons Cannavaro is being hard done by.

"Personally I still support Cannavaro to lead Evergrande. If a team has bad performances, the head coach will be blamed first," said Guangzhou native Peng. "But it has been such a special season. The team has been in three lockdown areas to compete this season from the two phases in the CSL and now in the AFC Champions League due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It's exhausting and some players are injured. It affects a player's mentality, so it's normal to have such results. I don't think they need to change the coach in such a hurry."