Rizhao Yuqi

The men who put the club together in 2014 were amateurs from Rizhao who wanted their city to have a professional side of its own, and it had never had one. That first stretch was spent winning things that do not appear on any national honours board — the city league, twice running — before the club climbed far enough to matter beyond Shandong.

The Shandong FA Cup was the win that changed the register. A provincial trophy is a modest thing until you notice what it certified: a group of enthusiasts had built a team good enough to beat everything else in a province of a hundred million people.

Then came the Chinese Champions League, and two years that read almost identically. In 2022 the side got past Yingkou Chaoyue on penalties to reach the last 16, then finished 15th in the final round and stayed where it was. In 2023 it went one round further, to the quarter-finals, and lost to Guangxi Hengchen on penalties. Sixth place. Still no promotion.

What promotion the club eventually got, in February 2024, came without a shootout: a place in China League Two opened up because teams higher in the pyramid folded. Ten years of red-and-white kit and city-league medals ended in the third division by administrative arithmetic.

The home ground was the Rizhao International Football Center, a compact venue of 12,000, and it did not hold the club long. At the end of 2024 the side moved to Lanzhou, more than a thousand miles west, passed under the control of the local Longyuan club, and was re-registered as Longyuan Jingji. The name Rizhao Yuqi stopped existing.

Its sharpest opponents were the ones it met in those knockout ties — Yingkou Chaoyue, beaten from twelve yards, and Guangxi Hengchen, who returned the favour a year later. Rizhao never got the chance to make either of them a habit.