Guangzhou Dandelion

The 2025 season finds Guangzhou Dandelion Alpha in the middle of China League Two, 11th of the 24 clubs in the country's third tier, and the first under a name the Chinese Football Association only signed off on 27 December 2024.

Before that ruling the team played as Guangzhou Anhua, and before it played at all it was something else entirely: a social training centre for young players, tied to the Modern Anhua group of companies and set up in 2013 with no professional ambitions attached.

The shift began in 2019, when the centre reorganised itself as a satellite side for Guangzhou R&F, then a Chinese Super League club. A year later it was absorbed into the Guangzhou Football Association's talent programme and took in players who had missed out on the city's youth representative squad.

Promotion came in 2024. Anhua finished fourth in the national finals of the China Champions League, enough to earn a place in China League Two for the following year. The renaming followed within weeks.

Home matches are played at Zengcheng Stadium, which holds 12,000. The shirts are red at home, white away; the crest carries the same two colours.

What it has instead is a squad assembled largely from players the city's academies did not want.