Qingdao Red Lions

The confusion is worth clearing up first, because it follows this club around: Yaya Touré, Juanma Lillo and the rest belong to Qingdao Huanghai, a different side in the same city with no line of descent to the Red Lions. What the club has instead is a short, documented climb.

It began on 14 March 2016 as Qingdao Hongshi, a new outfit in the lower reaches of Chinese football, and for a couple of seasons after that it played amateur tournaments under a name few now use — Qingdao Fortschritt Red Lions. Promotion to China League Two arrived in 2018. From the third tier the side went up again, and by the middle of this decade it was an established second-division club.

Home is the Qingdao Tiantai Stadium, 20,525 seats. Red shirts, black shorts, red socks; on the road, white with the same black shorts.

Qingdao has more than one professional team, which makes the Qingdao derby a real fixture on the map — Hainiu and West Coast among them. For most of the Red Lions' existence it was a derby they watched rather than played: the divisions kept them apart, and the meetings that mattered were happening a tier above. Settling in China League One changed the geography of that.

There are no national trophies, no cup run to point back to.