Yunnan Yukun

Twenty-five goals from Nyasha Mushekwi carried Yunnan Yukun out of China League One in 2024. The Zimbabwean striker finished as the division's leading scorer under Jørn Andersen, who had arrived only in June.

The climb began at the bottom. Yuxi Education Investment set the club up in 2021 and entered it in the Chinese Champions League, the fourth tier, which it won the following year. Then League Two, then League One, then the Chinese Super League — a route that took the club through three name changes as well. It started as Yunnan Yukun Steel, became Yuxi Yukun Steel in 2022 to smooth the paperwork for promotion, and dropped the Steel from its name in March 2023, though the steel group still owns it.

What that promotion meant locally is harder to compress. No club from Yunnan Province had played in the Chinese Super League since the competition was founded in 2004; the province's last top-flight representative belonged to an earlier era of Chinese football entirely. Yuxi, a city of no great footballing weight, now hosts fixtures against Chengdu Rongcheng that the press has taken to calling the Southwest Derby — a rivalry that only became one once Yunnan Yukun reached the level where the two could meet.

The squad that got them there leaned on imports and experience rather than anything grown at home: Zakaria Labyad in midfield, Alexandru Ioniță in attack, with Zhao Yuhao as captain. There is no academy behind them to speak of.

Home is the Yuxi Plateau Sports Centre Stadium, orange and black on the pitch, 22,000 seats around it.