A few weeks ago, a group of Chengdu Rongcheng fans unveiled a banner that proudly announced themselves as Chinese Super League champions. Even though there was over a month of the season remaining, they were celebrating.
And not unreasonably. Chengdu had been top of the league since the opening week of the season, and with four games remaining, they were 12 points clear of second-placed Dalian Yingbo. As such, they required just a single point from their remaining fixtures to secure the title.
You can see where this is going. Chengdu lost their last four games, and were overtaken on the final day by Dalian, who finished level on points but claimed the title on head-to-head record.
Maybe you don’t wish to be harsh by calling Chengdu bottle jobs, or chokers, but it’s difficult to recall a bigger collapse by any other team at the end of any other season.
In some respects this was actually a pretty appropriate way for one of the strangest seasons imaginable to end.
Chengdu were the favourites to win the league at the start of the season, but not necessarily because they had the best team. They were given something of a leg-up by an extraordinary crackdown on historic match-fixing at the start of this year, in which an astonishing range of punishments were handed down to clubs, players, coaches, executives and officials.
But most relevantly for these purposes, nine of the 16 teams in the CSL were deducted points for involvement in historic match-fixing, mostly from the 2010s and early 2020s, which included defending champions Shanghai Port. Chengdu were thus one of just seven teams who started the season on zero points, and the only one who finished in the top six last season.
With that advantage in their back pocket, they started the season like a train, winning 11 of their first 12 games, and building a commanding lead at the top while Dalian languished in mid-table. By the end of June, they were 10 points clear with barely half of the season gone.
Manager John Aloisi, who had taken over at the start of the season, was nicknamed ‘Master Aloisi’, as it seemed he would lead them to glory. “At the moment, a lot of people also not only want us to win the league, but do it without the points deduction as well,” Aloisi said in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald at the start of September.
John Aloisi was in charge of Chengdu (Masashi Hara/Getty Images)
They had only lost two games by the halfway point, but one of those was a 2-0 defeat to Dalian, which would become crucial later on. And while the wheels didn’t truly come off until the season’s denouement, the axels started to wobble in July, which saw the start of a seven-game run without a win.
Some of the fans turned on Aloisi, and he seemed to almost foreshadow the impending disaster. “It’s a different position for everyone here, not only the players but the club, the supporters,” he told the Herald. “Sometimes they get so nervous about it that the nervous energy can go on to the players, so I have to try and keep that at bay.”
This was partly because they had seen this movie before. Chengdu were top of the table with six games to go in 2025 before winning just one of those fixtures and slipping to third.
Still, a couple more victories seemed to set things right, and they were on the verge of sealing their first-ever title with five games left. A victory over Henan FC would have wrapped things up, but they could only draw 0-0: that was their last league game for a month, due to a mixture of the Asian Games, the AFC Champions League and the extended international break. Did the long break with just a point needed get into their heads? Possibly, but even if the answer to that is yes, it shouldn’t have been a problem.
After all, one point from four games — you could almost get that by accident. And there were several moments in those last four games where they came within millimetres of getting it.
They were minutes away from being champions in the fourth-last game, before Tianjin Jinmen Tiger scored a 91st-minute winner. In their second-last game against Dalian, with a packed home crowd gathering to see them crowned, Chengdu missed a penalty and had a 90th-minute equaliser ruled out by VAR for (a pretty clear) offside.
Panic set in at this stage, one of the main problems being that they now hadn’t scored in four games, never mind picked up any points.
Around 4,000 fans travelled just over 1,000 miles to Shandong for the final game. Chengdu still only needed a point to be champions. An early, nerve-settling goal was required, but Shandong Taishan were 2-0 up within 23 minutes. Chengdu pulled goals back to make it 2-1, then 3-2, and had a shot cleared off the line in the closing stages, but they couldn’t break through.
Even then, it’s worth remembering that Chengdu could have lost the game but still won the league, had Dalian not done their own bit. Indeed, there was a 20-minute spell in the second half of Dalian’s snow-covered game against Tianjin when they were drawing, and thus heading for second place. But they scored two second-half goals to secure the victory and an improbable title.
As much as this was a choke by Chengdu, it was a remarkable effort by Dalian: they couldn’t afford to drop a single point in their last five games, otherwise Chengdu would have lurched over the line.
Felipe and Wellington Silva celebrate a Chengdu goal in an AFC Champions League Elite match in February (Masashi Hara/Getty Images)
Chengdu went top after winning their first game of the season and stayed there until the final day. In the nine months between that opening game and the end of the season, they spent just over an hour not in first place. The first time all season that Dalian had been top was 15 minutes into the final game.
A kicker to this is that if the method of splitting teams had actually been goal difference — like in the Premier League — rather than head-to-head record, then Chengdu would have been champions: their goal difference was +15, whereas Dalian ended on +5. But because Dalian won both fixtures between the two sides, they finished top.
The reaction from the Chengdu fans, as you might expect, was not great. A group of them gathered outside the team’s hotel after the final game and had to be held back by security when the players emerged.
🇨🇳 DISTURBANCES from Chengdu Rongcheng fans, when receiving the players at the hotel.
Some Chinese fans came to reproach him for having carried out the biggest chest cold in the history of sports.
Moments of tension. https://t.co/auxGCK9suL pic.twitter.com/MIcMLkYG6k
— Ma Wukong 马悟空 (@Ma_WuKong) November 8, 2026
The club put out an open letter to their fans about 40 minutes after the game ended. “In competitive sports, there are wins and losses,” it read, as reported by the South China Morning Post. “We deeply feel that we are not as skilled as others, but we respect the results and calmly accept every experience.” The letter didn’t exactly calm anyone down and the speed of its publication seemed to enrage some fans further.
Aloisi was sacked, as you might expect, with a curt statement a couple of days later. Chairman Wang Lei and general manager Wu Bo also resigned.
The rest of the country weren’t quite so disappointed. Chengdu are not especially popular in the rest of China, partly because of their fans’ behaviour, which Chinese journalist William Bi described to The Athletic as “excessively radical.” Last season, the club was fined around $70,000 (£52,000) after some fans racially abused then-Henan winger Frank Acheampong (who subsequently moved to Dalian and was part of the team that usurped Chengdu), and further sanctions came after fans threw bottles at Ulsan HD players during an Asian Champions League game. The banner proclaiming them early champions, which displayed a perceived air of arrogance, didn’t help.
The big question is: how did this happen? There seems to be no single reason, but a combination of factors included key player and captain Wei Shihao missing the last three games after being suspended for making an obscene gesture at opposing fans. Top scorer Felipe Silva also missed two of those final four games.
One reason could be that Chengdu’s squad simply was not good enough, that they started the season brilliantly but did not have the depth to finish the job. Just two wins in their last 14 games backs that theory up.
But ultimately it would appear that the pressure of going for the club’s first-ever title (they were only actually formed in 2018) became too much and they crumbled.
“We are indeed very disappointed not to have won the championship,” Aloisi told the media after the final defeat. “We are in a very despairing state. There is nothing else to say.”
Source: www.nytimes.com
