The 'Taihu Derby': Jiangsu's Amateur Football League Reaches Its Final Tonight
Wuxi, unbeaten almost all season, meets Changzhou, last year's laughingstock turned comeback story, in the final of the Jiangsu City Football League — the amateur competition that has become one of the strangest and most popular phenomena in Chinese sport.
On Saturday evening at Nanjing's Olympic Sports Centre, Wuxi and Changzhou will meet in the final of the Jiangsu City Football League — the competition Chinese fans call the "Su Super League," or 苏超. The two finalists are both Lake Tai cities, a short drive apart, which has handed the match a ready-made name: the Taihu derby.
The league is barely two seasons old and is not professional. Its players are students, tradesmen, and local sportsmen; its thirteen teams are Jiangsu's thirteen cities; and its fixture list is, in effect, a map of the province's old municipal rivalries — rivalries usually fought over GDP rankings and high-school entrance scores, now fought with a ball. That is the joke and the engine of the thing. A league catchphrase puts it as "match first, friendship fourteenth." Last year's inaugural final, when Nantong beat Taizhou, drew more than 60,000 spectators, with Taizhou fans arriving in Peking-opera phoenix crowns and Nantong fans singing a war chant in unison.
This year's final pairs two very different seasons. Wuxi is the machine: top of the table for nine straight weeks, beaten only once, and armed with the league's top scorer, Liu Yuhao, on eleven goals. The back story is better than the numbers. One fan's widely shared profile notes that the 1.89-metre target man — nicknamed the "Wuxi Haaland" — played abroad in Portugal and Lithuania in his teens, won two second-division titles with Chinese clubs, and in 2026 is not on any professional registration list at all. The league's most feared striker, in other words, is an amateur who "has welded himself to the top of the scoring charts" (焊死射手榜, as the post has it) while holding down a life outside the game.
Changzhou supplies the redemption arc. Last season the city lost so often that fans turned its name into a running joke, stripping strokes off the characters for Changzhou until there was almost nothing left — the team was said to be "borrowing strokes" from other cities to keep its name written whole. This year the same city fought its way to third in the regular season, lost the first leg of its quarter-final, then beat Suzhou with a three-goal second-leg comeback, and swept Yancheng out of the semi-finals with three goals from corner kicks. State media have adopted the script: Xinhua is streaming the final live, and Olympic champions including swimmer Zhang Yufei are billed among the guests.
Whatever Saturday's result, the league has already done something China's professional game has struggled to do for a decade: fill stadiums with people who came for the football, not the fireworks, and made the provincial map worth arguing about again.
