Robert Gonnella had no idea that he would write Chinese football history when he came to Beijing in 1994 at the age of 26. A forwarding agent by training from Duesseldorf, he had secured a scholarship to study Chinese and logistics. But he didn’t want to be completely without football in a foreign country. Even when he was still in Japan, where he had previously worked for two years at the freight forwarding company „Nippon Express,“ he founded a hobby team with friends called „Fortuna 1993 Tokyo,“ a nod to his home club. „So it was only natural for me to set up a team in Beijing too,“ the 55-year-old says.