Sichuan Jiuniu

The players who pulled on the first shirts in 2017 came out of Sichuan's provincial youth set-up. It started in the amateur league in Chengdu, in yellow — the colour Sichuan football had used since the 1990s — with red kept for the crest.

Then the money arrived. In February 2019 a consortium led by City Football Group, the owners of Manchester City, together with the robotics firm UBTECH, took the club over and hung the sponsor's name on it. That same year it went up out of China League Two. UBTECH gave up the naming rights in 2021, when the Chinese Football Association pushed clubs towards neutral titles, and Jiuniu — Nine Bulls — came back.

The season that mattered was 2023. Winning China League One took the club into the Chinese Super League and made it the first side from Sichuan province to finish top of the second division. Before that, the deepest runs had been in the Chinese FA Cup, quarter-finals in 2018 and again in 2021.

Sichuan did not get to keep them. In January 2024 the club was re-registered in Shenzhen, in Guangdong, more than a thousand miles from Chengdu, and on 6 February it became Shenzhen Peng City. The yellow went too, replaced by sky blue. Home games moved first to Bao'an Stadium and, from 2025, to the Shenzhen Sports Center Stadium, which holds 45,000.

What the club is doing in the top flight is holding on.