Shandong Luneng Taishan F.C.

Shandong Luneng Taishan F.C.

Shandong Luneng Taishan (Simplified Chinese: 山东鲁能泰山) is a Chinese Super League football club owned by Shandong Luneng Group, the biggest supplier of electric energy in Shandong province. The team has been playing at the Shandong Provincial Stadium in Jinan, Shandong and is among the very few in the league that never relegated to the second division since the start of professional league football in China in 1994. The predecessor of Shandong Luneng Taishan was the Shandong Provincial team founded in April 1956. The club's first ever foreign coach was Kim Jung-Nam, who managed South Korea during 1986 FIFA World Cup. In 1999 the team won its first league Champion under former Yugoslavia head coach Slobodan Santrač and became the first Chinese club team to win the league and FA cup double. In the early 2000s the team was coached by former Soviet Union head coach Boris Ignatiev and former Cameroon World Cup head coach Valeri Nepomniachi. Ljubiša Tumbaković had been the head coach of the team from 2004 to 2009, the longest and most successful in the club history so far, having won two league titles and two FA cups in a period of five years. Head coach of the team, Henk ten Cate from the Netherlands, resigned in September 2012 for private reasons; the monotonous daily life in Taishan and living separated from his family.