Shanghai Shenhua

Early club

Shanghai Shenhua's predecessor was originally called East China, a team name used as far back as 1910 for football in the multi-sport event Chinese National Games. The local Shanghai government sports body decided to use this name for their new club, founded on 1 November 1951, to take part in China's first fully nationalized national football league tournament, where they finished second in the league that year. The football league gradually expanded and the team was allowed to name themselves after their own province of Shanghai in 1957. Soon afterwards, by 1961, Shanghai started to establish themselves as a major football team within China when they won their first league title. This was then quickly followed by their second league title in 1962. However, in 1966, because of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, football in China was halted and Shanghai was unable to play. When football returned in China, Shanghai was able to return to the top tier. However, they were unable to regain any of the dominance that they had previously shown and were even relegated in 1980. Though they were able to be quickly promoted in the following season, they spent many years without actually winning any titles until Wang Houjun led them to win the Chinese FA Cup in 1991, which was their first trophy in 29 years.

Professionalism

Throughout the 1990s, the Chinese Football Association was demanding more professionalism from their football teams and while many were semi-professional, Shanghai would be one of the first when they gathered sponsorship from Yu Zhifei and the local company named Shenhua ("Flower of Shanghai") on 10 December 1993, founding Shanghai Shenhua.

This then saw Shanghai hire their first professional manager in Xu Genbao, who was the previous China national team manager, in 1994. The move would quickly see Shanghai win the second professional football league title by the end of the 1995 league season.

When Xu left, Shanghai attempted to bring in several foreign coaches to add more experience to the team. However, few achieved any success despite being close on several occasions, except for Muricy Ramalho's brief spell when the club won the 1998 Chinese FA Cup.

By the end of 2001, the Shenhua group ended their sponsorship of the club and were replaced by SVA and the Shanghai Media & Entertainment Group. The club changed its name to Shanghai Shenhua SVA SMEG Football Club. The team, however, remained unique as it still retained "Shenhua" in its name, whereas many other teams dropped the name of their former sponsors completely.

On the pitch, the club would take over Shanghai 02, a youth football team set up by Xu Genbao, while also bringing in a new manager in Wu Jingui, who built a new squad predominantly using many from the Shanghai 02 squad and despite struggling in his debut season, he was able to win the league title in 2003.

Zhu Jun era

In 2007, the owner of inner-city rival Shanghai United, Zhu Jun and his company The9 Limited, bought a majority share of Shanghai Shenhua and began to merge Shanghai United into Shanghai Shenhua. His first act was to replace the previously successful existing head coach Wu Jingui with Shanghai United's Osvaldo Giménez. The appointment was to prove highly disruptive and Wu Jingui was quickly brought back as the head coach after only a few months, but was sacked on 9 September 2008. Jia Xiuquan took over his position on the same day. This was followed by the club adding to their backroom staff when, on 1 January 2009, Shenhua made Chinese football history by becoming the first Chinese team to hire a foreign CEO and a technical director. The club hired former manager Osvaldo Gimenez as their chief executive officer. One day later, former PSV Eindhoven technical director Stan Valckx joined Shenhua in the same position.