苏超sū chāo

Jiangsu Super League (the city football league)

bǐ sài dì yī, yǒu yì dì shí sì!比赛第一，友谊第十四！The match first, friendship fourteenth!

苏超 is short for 江苏省城市足球联赛, the Jiangsu city football league. Its first season, in 2025, turned old rivalries between Jiangsu’s 13 cities into jokes that spread across Chinese social media.

Took off: 2025
Started in: A Jiangsu football league
Today: Current

What it means

苏 stands for 江苏, the province, and 超 for 超级联赛, “super league”. The name copies 中超, China’s top professional league, for a league of amateur teams.

Each of Jiangsu’s 13 cities has one team. Fans call every match a derby and joke about the two cities’ food, history and money. A popular line, 比赛第一，友谊第十四, turns the sports saying 友谊第一，比赛第二, “friendship first, competition second”, around: with 13 rivals, friendship comes fourteenth.

How people use it

It is current. 苏超 is the name of a real league, so people use it as a name: you watch 苏超, go to a 苏超 game, argue about 苏超.

The city jokes are part of it: friends from two Jiangsu cities tease each other about food and money before their teams meet.

亮亮

周末一起去看苏超吗？
zhōu mò yì qǐ qù kàn sū chāo ma?
Want to go to a Su Chao game this weekend?
票还买得到吗？
piào hái mǎi de dào ma?
Can you still get tickets?
我抢到两张！
wǒ qiǎng dào liǎng zhāng!
I grabbed two!
太好了，比赛第一，友谊第十四
tài hǎo le, bǐ sài dì yī, yǒu yì dì shí sì
Great. The match first, friendship fourteenth.

More examples

今晚的苏超你看吗？
jīn wǎn de sū chāo nǐ kàn ma?
Are you watching tonight’s Su Chao game?
我是南京人，苏超当然支持南京。
wǒ shì nán jīng rén, sū chāo dāng rán zhī chí nán jīng.
I’m from Nanjing, so in Su Chao I root for Nanjing, of course.

Where it came from

The league kicked off on 10 May 2025. Within weeks fans were trading jokes about the matches, and the Douyin topic for the league passed 100 million views. The Paper collected some jokes in June: when Wuxi lost an away game, fans blamed low blood sugar from noodles that were not sweet enough, a joke about Wuxi’s sweet cooking. A save by Lianyungang’s goalkeeper became 花果山猴王接蟠桃, “the Monkey King catching peaches”, because Lianyungang claims the Monkey King’s home mountain from the classic novel.

The final, on 1 November 2025 in Nanjing, drew 62,329 people, a record for amateur football in China. Taizhou, sixth in the regular season, beat Nantong on penalties.

咬文嚼字 put 苏超 on its list of the ten most popular phrases of 2025.

The original. There is no single image. The league spread through match clips and fans’ joke posts about the city rivalries. The Paper collected the first jokes in June 2025. The Paper (in Chinese)