Qingdao Jonoon

The one trophy that matters sits from 2002, when the club — then playing as Qingdao Etsong Hainiu, under sponsorship from a local tobacco firm — beat Liaoning Bird 2:0 in the final of the Chinese FA Cup. Days later they came up short against Shandong Luneng in the Chinese Super Cup, but the FA Cup has stayed the club's only major honour since.

The story starts earlier and under a different name. A group of former players in Qingdao formed the club in 1990 as the Shandong Economic and Trade Commission football team. On 31 December 1993 it turned professional, the first club in the city to do so, and took the name Hainiu — literally "Sea Bull," though English sources of the era rendered it as Manatee. The sponsor changed the badge more than once after that: Etsong took over in 1997, and in December 2004 a cable company, Qingdao Jonoon Group, bought in and dropped "Hainiu" from the name entirely, running the club as Qingdao Jonoon for the better part of two decades. Jonoon Group never sold its stake, but in 2021 the club brought the old name back, playing again as Qingdao Hainiu.

Blue and red have been the colours since the Jonoon takeover, blue at home and red away, though for a stretch the club also fielded an orange kit meant to read as more aggressive. Home games are now played at the Qingdao Youth Football Stadium, which holds 50,000; before 2019 the club used Qingdao Tiantai Stadium for over a decade. The derby that matters locally is against the other Qingdao side, West Coast, formerly known as Huanghai and Zhongneng — the two have shared the city's football attention for years, while any rivalry with Shandong Taishan up the road in Jinan has never carried the same weight on the pitch that it does in basketball and table tennis.

No name from the club's history carries more weight than Suo Maozhen, captain and forward through its best years, who also played for the Chinese national team while at Qingdao.