Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today we are looking
at one of the most unprecedented cross -cultural
experiments in modern sports. It really is. Yeah,
it's the brief, frankly wild, 10 -year lifespan
of Oriental Dragon FC. And if you're listening,
you need to know this wasn't just some grassroots
team where locals gather on a Sunday. Right,
definitely not. It was a highly engineered project
dropped into a small Portuguese town, and it
had this massive global agenda. So our mission
today is to explore this unusual sports experiment,
which was basically an incubator meticulously
designed to hack development and fast track success.
It really is a remarkable case study for anyone
listening right now who has ever, you know, been
part of a corporate incubator. Or maybe you've
watched a company try to aggressively fast track
its R &D by just throwing capital at a foreign
market. Oh, absolutely. Because this 10 year
timeline. is essential studying for you. It shows
exactly what happens when you try to apply massive
resources to artificially engineer success within
a system that is traditionally very organic and
slow moving. Okay, let's unpack this. Because
to truly understand Oriental Dragon FC, we really
have to look at the architect who built it. We
do. So we are going back to 2014. The club is
founded in Moira, Portugal by a company called
W Sports 7. Right. And at the head of this organization
is an investor named Keith Chen. Now, Chen had
not just appeared out of nowhere with a massive
checkbook and a fantasy. He actually had a highly
credible track record in this specific market.
You knew exactly what he was doing. Yeah, he
had been operating within the Portuguese football
system since around 2006. And more importantly,
he was the mechanism behind the transfers of
Chinese players, specifically Yudabao and Wang
Gang. Right, the Benfica transfer. Exactly. He
brought them to SL Benfica back in 2006 and 2007.
Which is a crucial detail to underline here.
I mean, SL Benfica is not just any club. It is
an absolute titan in European football, completely
renowned globally for its talent development.
Oh, for sure. And orchestrating a transfer for
international players into a system like that
requires way more than just making a phone call.
It requires a deep understanding of visas, work
permits, cultural integration. The bureaucracy
alone is wild. Exactly. Plus the intense tactical
demands of the Portuguese game. Chen understood
the structural machinery of European football
inside and out. He really did. He knows the landscape.
He knows the major power brokers. And he has
these deep established ties to one of the most
prestigious academies in the world. But here
is the twist. What's fascinating here is the
true underlying purpose behind the creation of
Oriental Dragon FC. Because if you were starting
a football club in the Portuguese lower leagues,
the natural assumption is that your ultimate
goal is domestic glory. You know, you want to
win local trophies, climb the national pyramid,
maybe secure a lucrative television contract.
That is the standard playbook. Right. But that
was not Key Chen's objective at all. Oregon McGregor
FC was essentially a factory. It was created
specifically to train Chinese players under elite
Portuguese coaching. Which is so unique. The
grand vision was to eventually export these highly
trained players back to China with the expectation
that this imported European expertise would elevate
the quality of the Chinese domestic league and
ultimately the Chinese national team. It is essentially
the sports equivalent of an offshore development
team. That's a great way to put it. If you work
in tech or finance, you see this model all the
time. You take your raw talent, you move them
to an environment where the infrastructure, the
daily competition, and the mentorship are just
light years ahead of what you have locally. Right.
You immerse them in it. Exactly. You let them
absorb all that institutional knowledge for a
few years, and then you bring that polished,
highly competitive asset back home to dominate
your domestic market. That is the theory on paper,
certainly. But managing human athletes is very
different from managing software developers.
You cannot just drop a group of teenagers into
a foreign country, put them on a pitch and expect
them to compile perfectly. No, not at all. You
have to account for the physical environment,
the profound culture shock and the reality that
development requires actual high stakes competitive
pressure. They couldn't just practice. They needed
to be battle tested. And that need for battle
testing immediately collided with reality. Let
us look at the squad they assembled in Moita
in 2014. The club was composed exclusively of
Chinese footballers, every single player on the
roster. Which is incredibly rare. And crucially,
they were all young, aged 15 to 19. Initially,
they started out as a second team to an existing
local club, CD Pinholm Events, just to get a
foothold in the region. Lifted started, yeah.
Right. But... They hit a massive bureaucratic
roadblock right out of the gate because so many
of these players were under 18. They were legally
barred from playing in the official sanctioned
Portuguese leagues. Which is an absolute disaster
if your entire business model is based on gaining
competitive minutes. Yeah, it completely stalls
the project. The whole point of spending the
capital to bring them to Europe was to subject
them to the tactical rigor of European match
days. You simply cannot develop elite players
just by having them run passing drills in a vacuum.
They need real opponents. Exactly. They needed
real matches against varied opponents. But the
governing bodies have strict age and registration
rules, and those rules stood squarely in their
way. Here's where it gets really interesting.
Because Keechin's group did not just pack up
and accept defeat. They didn't just sit around
for three years waiting for these kids to turn
18. No, they got creative. Very creative. They
engineered a workaround that is, frankly, staggering
in its scale. They literally funded and created
their own bespoke U21 youth league, which they
dubbed the Future Stars League. And this highlights
the sheer financial leverage of the Oriental
Dragon Project. They didn't just rent a pitch
and play friendlies. This future stars league
included actual established clubs from both the
Lisbon and Setúbal football associations. But
because Oriental Dragon was footing the bill
for the league's operations, they were in a position
to dictate the terms of engagement. Which is
wild. And the primary condition was entirely
self -serving from a developmental standpoint.
They required every single participating team
to field at least one Chinese player. during
the matches. Think about the audacity of that
leverage. You are paying for the league, so you
essentially buy the rulebook. You make the rules.
Yeah. You are forcing the local Portuguese teams
to integrate Chinese players into their actual
competitive lineups. It forces cross -cultural
play on every side of the ball, ensuring your
players are constantly immersed in the local
tactical style, even when they are playing for
the opposition. It is incredibly clever from
a strategic standpoint. But we also have to consider
the friction this inevitably caused. Put yourself
in the shoes of a local club manager in Setúbal.
You were trying to develop your own local academy
kids. You were trying to win matches. And suddenly
the league's financier is dictating your starting
11. It must have been so frustrating for them.
You are mandated to alter your tactical setup
to accommodate a player from the Oriental Dragon
project. While it solved Ki -Chen's immediate
problem, It introduced a massive competitive
distortion into the local ecosystem. It was a
purely transactional relationship. A transactional
relationship that they reinforced by bringing
in the absolute best teachers money could buy.
Because Chen had those old, deep -rooted ties
to SL Benfica from his transfer dealings years
prior, he leveraged those relationships to stack
Oriental Dragon FC with former Benfica B coaches.
This cannot be overstated. For a newly formed
club of 15 to 19 year olds to be trained by technicians
who used to run the reserve squad for one of
the most prestigious academies in world football
is practically unheard of. It's a huge advantage.
The Benfica B system is designed to produce Champions
League level talent. By securing that specific
coaching staff, Oriental Dragon ensured that
the daily tactical instruction their players
received was elite. They controlled the roster,
they bought the league to circumvent the rules,
and they hired top -tier professors. It was a
vertically integrated talent laboratory. Exactly.
So eventually, the players age up. the bureaucracy
clears, and the club can officially enter the
actual Portuguese football league system. This
happens in the 2015 -2016 season. Right. They
make their debut in the fifth tier of Portuguese
football, specifically the Setúbal Football Association's
second division. They finish eighth out of nine
teams in their phase, and the record shows they
had nine Chinese players on the roster at that
point. So a bit of a slow start. Yeah, it is
a modest, slightly rocky start. But then... The
engine really starts to catch gear. The early
growing pains begin to fade. You have to remember
that the fifth tier of Portuguese football is
not glamorous. It is physical. It is grueling.
And it is played on rough pitches against hardened
local veterans. It's a tough environment. Very
tough. For a team of young, imported players
to navigate that requires serious adaptation.
But by the 2017 -2018 season, the tactical discipline
instilled by those Benfica coaches start paying
dividends. They finish second in that division,
which earns them a promotion up to the Satubal
FA First Division. And they prove it wasn't a
fluke. The very next year, the 2018 -2019 season,
they reach the finals of the AF Setúbal Cup.
They are climbing the ranks, figuring out the
specific algorithm required to win in the Portuguese
lower leagues. They are establishing a rhythm,
the players are absorbing the physical demands
of the game, and the infrastructure WSports 7
built is operating at maximum efficiency. Which
brings us to the 2019 -2020 season. This is the
moment where the project looks like an unstoppable
juggernaut. Oriental Dragon FC is playing in
the Setúbal FA First Division, and they are absolutely
dominating the field. Just crushing the competition.
They are tearing through it. By the time the
COVID -19 pandemic hits and forces the premature
cancellation of the season, they are sitting
in first place. And they aren't just winning,
they are an incredible 11 points clear of the
second place club, FC Barance. An 11 -point lead
at the time of cancellation is a massive statement.
It shows they had completely outgrown the regional
district level. Because of that overwhelming,
undeniable dominance, the governing bodies officially
awarded them promotion. A huge milestone. This
is a massive inflection point. They move up to
the national third tier, the Campeonato de Portugal.
They are out of the localized regional scrap
and stepping into the national spotlight. They
are swimming with much bigger fish now. And they
immediately prove they belong in those deep waters.
We have to look at their runs in the Taça de
Portugal during this era. The domestic cup. Right.
In the 2020 -2021 season, they make it to the
third round and draw Lake Soins, a highly experienced,
hardened second -tier side. Oriental Dragon pushes
the second -tier team all the way to a penalty
shootout before finally being defeated. To take
a second -tier professional team to penalties
when your club has only existed for a few years
is a stunning achievement. It validates the entire
incubator concept. It really does. It proves
that the controlled environment, the top -tier
coaching, and the systemic hacking actually produced
a squad capable of absorbing immense pressure
on a national stage. But they weren't done. The
next year, the 2021 -2022 season, they again
make the third round of the Cup. This time, they
draw Morenz. Wow. Morenz is a first -tier side.
a top -flight premier club. And Oriental Dragon
drags this top -tier team into extra time, eventually
losing a heartbreaking 3 -2 match. For Chichen
and his investors, this had to feel like absolute
vindication. Your highly engineered project from
Moida is taking top five Portuguese clubs to
the absolute brink. It is the zenith of the Oriental
Dragon experience. It is the peak of the mountain.
Yeah. And the system rewarded them for it. Right.
During that same 2021 -2022 season, the Portuguese
football pyramid underwent a structural change,
creating a brand new lead called Liga 3. This
was to serve as the new, highly competitive third
tier. Yeah, shifting everything around. Because
of their strong standing, Oriental Dragon was
placed into this newly created League of Three.
They were at the highest competitive point in
their entire history. But as anyone who studies
complex systems knows, the margins at the absolute
top are incredibly thin. So what does this all
mean? Because this is the exact moment the fairy
tale shatters. We just talked about them taking
top tier teams to extra time. But in that very
same 2021 -2022 season, in the newly created
League of Three. They completely and utterly
collapsed. They finished dead last in their division
in the series south. They are forced into their
relegation series, and they finish dead last
there too. And that failure triggers a devastating,
uncontrollable relegation cascade. It is important
to understand the mechanics of this fall. When
a traditional, deeply rooted community club suffers
a bad season and gets relegated, they have a
safety net. Right. They have the fans. Exactly.
They have local fans who will still buy tickets.
They have a massive local youth academy where
they can pull up free talent to replace expensive
players who leave. They have generations of local
goodwill to sustain them through the storm. But
Oriental Dragon didn't have any of that. Precisely.
They were a prefabricated structure. They were
a top -down incubator. When the momentum broke
in Liga 3, there was no foundational bedrock
to catch them. Nothing to fall back on. The external
capital could only insulate them for so long
against the brutal reality of sustained multi
-year professional competition. From Liga 3,
they are immediately relegated back down to the
Campeonato de Portugal, which had now been pushed
down to become the fourth tier of the pyramid.
The momentum is completely working in reverse
now. The next year, 2022 -2023, they manage a
ninth -place finish out of 14 teams in their
series. But the bleeding doesn't stop. The structural
integrity of the project is failing. Once a project
built entirely on rapid upward momentum begins
to slide backward, the internal logic of the
investment starts to unravel. The elite coaches
move on, the top -tier talent looks for better
opportunities, and the massive financial output
required to sustain a falling club becomes impossible
to justify. And the fall is rapid. By the 2023
-2024 season, they are all the way back down
in the fifth tier, the AF Satubo 1 and Mir division.
They are right back in the very regional, localized
leagues they had engineered their way out of
a decade prior. Full circle. Yeah. They finished
fifth that year. And then, the sudden... Absolute
end. By 2024, the club completely ceases operations.
Dissolved. Ten years after T -Chen brought a
group of teenagers to Moita, the Oriental Dragon
FC experiment is simply over. It is a stunningly
rapid unraveling. To climb so high, so fast,
and then completely evaporate in the span of
three years. But there is one final, almost surreal
footnote in the documentation. Oh, the stadium
thing? Yes. Even though the club has ceased operations,
there's higher speculation that Oriental Dragon
could theoretically be renewed and re -entered
into the lower leagues. However, this potential
renewal is entirely contingent on the construction
of a hypothetical dedicated club facility. And
are they building it? As the record strictly
notes, to date, absolutely no construction of
such a facility is underway. It is a phantom
clause. A hypothetical stadium for a club that
no longer exists, keeping the name on life support
on a piece of paper somewhere in a filing cabinet.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, the
10 -year lifespan of Oriental Dragon FC serves
as a brilliant, multifaceted lesson on the limits
of engineering success. Qi Chen and WSports7
proved that external capital and elite connections
can absolutely bypass the initial hurdles of
a traditional system. They really did. You can
leverage old favors to hire world -class tactical
instructors. You can literally fund your own
leagues to circumvent age restrictions and dictate
competitive terms to local clubs. You can buy
your way up the initial steps of the ladder.
They proved you can hack the climb. They went
from the fifth tier to taking first tier teams
to extra time. They absolutely hacked the climb.
But what their sudden collapse demonstrates is
that sustaining a club at the elite national
level requires something fundamentally different.
It requires roots. Yes, it requires resilience.
It requires deep, local roots and an organic
foundation that can survive a brutal season without
the entire organizational structure dissolving.
You can engineer the peak, but you cannot easily
engineer the safety net. It is the difference
between building a sleek, expensive house out
of prefabricated materials on top of the soil
versus spending decades pouring a concrete foundation
deep into the bedrock. When the storm finally
hit in Liga 3, the prefab house just blew over.
This raises an important question, and it is
something I think is deeply relevant for anyone
analyzing modern business tech. or sports ecosystems.
If a highly funded, meticulously connected, and
tactically brilliant incubator club ultimately
collapsed after just 10 years in traditional
football, does that mean the slow burn model
of grassroots building is the only sustainable
way? Or... And this is the thought I want to
leave you with. Is there another highly technical
industry out there where this exact Oriental
Dragon franchise model would actually work flawlessly?
That's a great point. Could you apply this exact
blueprint to a global esports organization or
a highly modular motorsports academy where capital
and elite instruction can completely bypass grassroots
tradition and actually sustain a dynasty? That
is a fascinating angle. Taking the Oriental Dragon
playbook, stepping away from the hundred year
old traditions of European football and applying
it to something like a League of Legends team
or a Formula Racing Academy. Exactly. Is it the
incubator model that failed or was it simply
the wrong environment to test it in? I want you
to really ponder that idea as you look at how
companies and teams are being built around you
today. Think about where else this kind of top
down engineered success is being deployed right
now and whether they have built a foundation.
to survive the fall. That is all the time we
have for today's exploration. Keep questioning
the structures around you, keep looking for those
hidden systemic connections, and we will see
you next time for another deep dive.