Dalian Kewei

Nobody has attached a face to Dalian Kewei yet. The club keeps no website or Weibo account where such a person might be introduced. What exists instead is a route through the divisions, walked quickly.

The club was put together in 2024, from nothing — not a rebuild, not a rebranding, not an amateur side handed a licence. That matters in Dalian, a city that lost Dalian Professional the same year. The new team took none of that history and made no claim on it, which is the unusual part: elsewhere a collapse of that size is followed by a successor trading on the old name. Kewei carried a name nobody recognised into the China Champions League, the fourth tier, and finished the 2025 season with promotion to China League Two.

The kit tells its own small story of a club still assembling itself. MIE supplied it through the 2025 campaign; Hummel takes over for 2026. Two suppliers in two seasons is what happens when a side is signing its first commercial deals while playing its first competitive matches.

So the third division is where the next season starts, with no trophies behind them and nothing to defend.