For so long football was considered to be the sleeping giant of professional sport in Australia, with many claiming that if we got our act together we would be a force to be reckoned with.

Slowly (in recent times VERY slowly) that giant is starting to wake up.

In Asian football the sleeping giant has always been China. For a country of its size it has massively underperformed on the continental and international stage, qualifying for the World Cup only once in 2002 and having never won the Asian Cup.

Like football in Australia, football in China is starting to awaken and it could have a major impact on football in Asia.

Earlier this year I wrote that, on the back of the crippling match fixing scandal, Chinese football would sink or swim in 2011. So far it's more Ian Thorpe (or Zhang Lin for those that know their Chinese swimmers) than Eric the Eel.

Everything in Chinese football this year is big - big crowds, big investments, big plans!

It'll come to the surprise of many that the Chinese Super League has the highest crowd average of the three big East Asian leagues - averaging more than 17,000 per game. That is 2,000 more than the J.League and 6,000 more than the K-League. The gap is a lot wider when comparing crowds in the AFC Champions League.

It is the investment in the game though that will have the biggest impact.

In my piece earlier this year I detailed the investment by Evergrande Real Estate Group in Guangzhou, which has seen them pump tens of millions into the side with stunning effect - the club are unbeaten after 15 games and are averaging more than 45,000 fans a game! Their lowest crowd this year, 38,612, is bigger than all bar one crowd in the J. League this year.

That investment continued in recent weeks with the quite ridiculous signing of little-known Argentinean Dario Conca.

Ridiculous in the sense of how much they're paying him - a reported €26.5m over two and a half years, making Conca the world's third highest paid player after Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

And all this on a player that has never been capped by his country and has never played in Europe. Quite frankly, it's absurd.

But it shows the sheer volume of money that is available in the Chinese game and you suspect he won't be the last player tempted by Guangzhou's, seemingly, bottomless pit of money.

An the other end of the country, another real estate company with pockets just as big is making arguably a more important investment in the game in China.

Dalian Wanda, a Real Estate group with assets worth more than $21 billion, will invest $77m into the Chinese game over the next three years, including in the all important area of youth development.

Earlier this year the CFA announced a raft of changes to the professional football structure to give more opportunities to younger players and with this investment in their pocket they will have plenty of money to make that plan a reality.

It couldn't come at a better time either. While a host of Japanese and Korean players are stepping up and making the move overseas, once again China has been left wanting, with only a handful of players playing abroad (and making no impact) and seemingly, no genuine stars ready to break through.

If this investment by Dalian Wanda in Chinese football can see a new generation of Chinese stars develop it will do wonders for Chinese football and cause a major shift in the power structures of Asian football. No longer will Japan and Korea be the dominant forces, they will have to fight and fight hard to keep their place atop the tree.

And with FIFA no doubt keen to take the World Cup to China in the not-too-distant-future we could be playing witness to the emergence of a new powerhouse, both in Asia and internationally.