After defeating Beijing Guoan on Nov. 17, 2022, a group photo was taken of all the participants of the Beihai Jizhi, with club founder Yao Jun third from the right in the last row. (Photo/photo provided by the interviewee)
On November 17, 2022, the biggest cold streak in Chinese soccer history erupted. Chinese Super League giants Beijing Guoan lost 5-7 to county-level team Jingchuan Wenhui. This was supposed to be the least suspenseful match in the second round of the FA Cup.
This mysterious Jingchuan Wenhui Football Club comes from Jingchuan County in eastern Gansu Province. It is unknown in the soccer world. After this unexpected victory over the Chinese Super League giants, various self-published media legends say that Jingchuan Wenhui's players come from takeaways, physical education teachers, insurance salesmen, and so on.
But this is not the case. The players representing Jingchuan Wenhui are from the Guangxi Beihai Jichi Football Club. Borrowing the shell of Jingchuan Wenhui, Beihai Jichi really made a comeback.
Like Jingchuan Wenhui, Beihai Jizhi is an obscure club that lives on the edge of life and death all the time.
lit. kick a ball on a shell
In the winter of 2019, Yao Jun took a youth training team of about 30 people to winter training in Beihai, Guangxi, not realizing that the epidemic came and trapped him and the team in Beihai.
Many players told the Southern Weekend reporter that every time they saw Yao Jun, he was on the phone, Yao Jun's bag perennially had 20,000 in cash, "When I didn't have any money, I would open up my address book one by one to see who else I could borrow some from."
In 2021, the Beihai Polaris suffered a loss in Guangxi and missed the championship game. If you don't play the game, these players will lose because "professional athletes not industry athletes are the equivalent of practicing swimming in a bathtub".
Borrowing is one way to play the Yiga game. Yao Jun is eyeing Gansu. Gansu has not sent a team to the national tournament in the past few years, so there are openings in the Chinese Championship. If we can work with local clubs in Gansu, we can participate in the championship as a Gansu team.
Before finding Jingchuan Wenhui, Yao Jun visited many places in Gansu and very few of them had registered clubs. It costs a lot of money to register a new club. The company that Yao Jun had previously reached an agreement with ended up losing the news before the tournament registration deadline.
Finally Gansu FA introduced him to Jingchuan Wenhui.
Chinese soccer clubs can be categorized into four tiers: the Chinese Super League, the Chinese First League, the Chinese Second League, and the Chinese Championship. Teams above the Chinese Second League will be regarded as professional teams, and the Chinese Championship is an amateur team.
Beihai Jichi became the hero behind Jingchuan Wenhui. A coach of Beihai Jichi told the Southern Weekend reporter that Jingchuan also called Yao Jun in the past few days. "I hope to unify the tone."
Some people were quite critical of Jingchuan Wenhui, but they were all blocked back by Yao Jun, "This is our commitment to them."
Lv Binwu, chairman of the Jingchuan Wenhui Club, confirmed to Southern Weekend that the victory over Beijing Guoan attracted a lot of sponsorship interest, "however, we didn't see a penny except for our local Red Bull apples and beef."
Wandering on the road
After the game in Rizhao, Shandong Province, on Nov. 20, Yao Jun took his team to rest in Jinan and is considering where to go next.
The team has been following him around for the past six months, "not staying in one place for more than three days. Beihai, Nanning, Guigang, Hezhou, Liuzhou, guests, Zunyi, Xi'an, Yinchuan, Jingchuan, Chongqing, Kunming, Yan'an, Wuhan, Jinan, Nanjing, Zhenjiang, Maoming, Hezhou, Rizhao." Yao Jun counts the places he has traveled for half a year in his qq space.
In fact, they weren't always known as the North Sea Extreme. In order for the team to play more games, they often wear other people's undershirts. Jingchuan Wenhui is just one of them. In the past, the North Sea had the Sentinel Green Aero Club.
Yao Jun, 52 years old, resembles Zhang Fei in the Three Kingdoms, with angry hair and his own Jianghu Qi. "It's nothing to beat Guoan, I can create a more brilliant future" "I want to build the best club in China", these words always come out of my mouth inadvertently.
"I'd love to save money, but I don't want them to see it." Yao Jun wants to keep the players' professional honor so they don't get frustrated, but the pockets are really shy.
The first-team players who took part in the tournament were not only professionals, but many had played for the Giants in the Chinese Super League and the Chinese First Division. Judging by their resumes, Beihai Jichi is the club they have played for the least.
In contrast, the local Jingchuan Wenhui team is only an amateur team that has never participated in a Chinese Championship match. According to Lv Binwu, the chairman of Jingchuan Wenhui Club, "Jingchuan Wenhui Football Club is a team composed of local soccer enthusiasts and passionate youths" some of whom work in hospitals, some in sports schools, and some in the Public Security Bureau.
Yao Jun arranges tactics in the lounge before the match against Beijing Guoan. (Photo/image provided by the interviewee)
Lv Binwu invested in the team. He told Southern Weekend that the team's first name was "744300 Club", which was the Jingchuan postal code sponsored by a local clothing company, and was later renamed "Precious Football Club".
He also had the name Wenhui, he opened a Wenhui bookstore and founded the Wenhui Training School. in 2021, with no tutoring available after the double cut, he "transitioned to become a club and went down the sports path."
Southern Weekend reporter, Jingchuan Football Association Chairman Wang Zhen, "the treasures are Wang Zhen's treasures." He owns a sporting goods company. The team was founded in 1999, when he was in sixth grade. A few soccer-playing boys set off a string of firecrackers on the playground to announce the team's formation. "The firecracker is still the one we chipped in to buy."
After graduating from the gymnasium, Wang Zhen returned to work at the Jingchuan Sports Department, where his childhood pals once again gathered. The team also dominated Pingliang City and won three consecutive city soccer tournaments. The official account of the Jingchuan Football Association posted an article What you want to know about Jingchuan soccer which included a group photo of his sixth grade team, as well as a group photo of him representing Jingchuan in a city tournament.
It was Beihai Polar that really beat Beijing Guoan, and the amateur players of Jingchuan Wenhui were the spectators of the game. These were two completely separate teams. Lv Binwu, chairman of Jingchuan Wenhui, knows little about the players. He told a reporter from Southern Weekend that he had "almost no contact". When asked which player's performance was the most impressive, he said for about ten seconds, "They're all pretty good."
fellow countrymen
The entire celebratory party maintains a subtle sense of detachment, the players rarely cross each other, but the whole scene stays warm. This sense of detachment is taboo in soccer. One player sighed, "This win over Beijing Guoan was the most like a team since its inception."
On November 30th, after spending a week in Hezhou, Guangxi, they returned to Beihai to prepare for the next round against Jinan Xingzhou. The opponent was a team that had not lost and was far superior to them.
