Ningbo Professional

The club that plays its home matches at Ningbo Cixi Stadium this season is the same one that spent its first sixteen years in Shanghai. The move east across Hangzhou Bay was completed in December 2025, when registration in Zhejiang province went through and the name became Ningbo Professional Football Club.

Before that there was Shanghai Boji, founded in 2009, and then Shanghai Jiading Huilong. Neither name travelled with the club, but the record did — and the part of it worth retelling belongs to 2019.

That autumn the side was still an amateur outfit in the Chinese Champions League, and it went into the Chinese FA Cup with nothing to lose. Yanbian Beiguo went out. Then Zhejiang Yiteng, a professional club. Then Beijing BSU. By the fifth round it was the only amateur team left in the competition, which is a sentence that gets written about a club perhaps once. In the same season it finished fifth in the Champions League and won the play-off for promotion to China League Two — the one trophy on the shelf, and the one that turned the whole thing professional.

Promotion to China League One in 2022 arrived by a colder route. Chongqing Liangjiang Athletic withdrew from the Chinese Super League, places opened up the pyramid, and the club was admitted to fill one. No final, no last day. The league table did the work.

An earlier Cup appearance, in 2015, ended in the first round on penalties against Qingdao Kunpeng.

Cixi Sports Center holds 16,000, and filling a meaningful share of it is part of what the relocation was for: a city that has not had a club of this level, and a club that needed somewhere to be from.