Qingdao Youth Island

A side that started out playing under a sponsor's name in the Chinese amateur pyramid took fourteen years and three rebrandings before it settled into anything resembling the club it is now. It first took the field as Qingdao Kangtaiyuan on 20 August 2007, became Qingdao Kangtine in 2017, then Qingdao Zhongchuang Hengtai in 2019, and only turned into Qingdao Youth Island on 18 January 2021 — a name it carried for barely two years before another change, to Qingdao West Coast, arrived in March 2023.

The football did more to establish the club than any of the names did. By 2021, now Youth Island, it had slipped to fourth in that same division but still went up: a play-off against Beijing BIT finished 2-2 after normal time and was settled 5-4 on penalties. A season in China League One followed, eighth place in 2022, before the club, freshly renamed West Coast, finished as runner-up in 2023 and reached the Chinese Super League for the first time.

Ge Zhen, the captain and later the club's vice general manager, joined from Shenzhen and had passed 300 appearances in the Chinese leagues by the time he retired in October 2024. Qingdao Hainiu supplies the club's one real rivalry, the Qingdao Derby; a national trophy is still missing from the record, and the closest it came was the last sixteen of the FA Cup in 2021, where Shandong Luneng won 3-0. Home matches are played at the Qingdao West Coast University City Stadium, which holds 20,013.

It is, on paper, still the club that lined up in 2007 as Qingdao Kangtaiyuan, working its way up from the amateur game one division at a time.