Shenzhen Peng

Shenzhen sits across the border from Hong Kong, a city built in four decades on electronics and trade rather than football tradition. For most of that time the top flight passed it by. That changed in 2024, when the club now called Shenzhen Peng City moved in, bringing with it a story that started nowhere near Guangdong.

The team began in 2017 as Sichuan Jiuniu, entering at the very bottom of the Chinese pyramid, the amateur league, and working through every division above it. City Football Group took a stake in 2019, making it the group's seventh club worldwide. The promotion run showed in patches: a run to the quarter-finals of the Chinese FA Cup in 2018, then in 2021 the tag "Dark Horse of the Chinese Football League" for reaching the same stage of the Cup while still playing in the second division. None of it yet carried the club into the top flight.

That arrived in 2023, when the club, still based in Chengdu, won the China League One title and earned promotion to the Chinese Super League for the first time. The move to Shenzhen and the rebrand followed within months, in January 2024, so the club that had spent seven years climbing through Sichuan arrived in the top division as a different name in a different province.

The colours travelled with it: sky blue for home, yellow with black shorts away, the same pale blue that marks out other clubs under the City Football Group umbrella. Home games are now played at Bao'an Stadium, which holds just over 44,000 people, a stage considerably larger than anything the club filled during its years working up from the amateur ranks.