The 2018 Dalian Yifang F.C. season was the ninth season in club history. Overview Dalian Yifang experienced a roller-coaster season, starting with a rather confusing status, then constantly improved their performances throughout the season, but faced difficulties again as multiple players are called up by the National training team, and finally made a great salvation. Confusing Preseason Yifang remained low profile after the last successful season, but the team decided not to renew the contract with Juan Caro, despite that Caro himself eagerly wanted to stay. On 26 December 2017, Dalian Yifang officially announced Ma Lin, who shortly sided with the team in 2014, to be the new manager, "under the decision of Dalian Municipal Bureau of Sports", indicating that the ownership of the team was actually in hiatus. Dalian Yifang moved to Foshan, Guangdong and trained there from 3 January to 12 February, then flew to Jeju, South Korea after the Chinese New Year for further training. Wanda Group, former owner of the disbanded famous local team Dalian Wanda F.C., was widely reported to take over Dalian Yifang, though the decision was not officially announced. The company sought to emphasize back on Chinese market by selling their major overseas assets including shares in Atlético Madrid, after Chinese government put strict regulations and bans on using domestic funding to invest foreign enterprises and investigated a few companies including Wanda, Hainan airlines and Anbang Group. Yifang released Ferrari and Boli, while the two-time best scorer Nyasha Mushekwi stayed. Yifang signed Mate Maleš from HNK Rijeka before Wanda took control, but later claimed that he was medically unfit as soon as Wanda brought Fonté, Carrasco and Gaitán in, thus terminated the transfer and excluded him from the squad, because the 2018 CSL allowed up to 4 foreign players to be registered in one team only. March Yifang started the season with a catastrophic 0-8 defeat against Shanghai SIPG in the coming back match. The tactics, performance and substitutions were all chaotic. The manager Ma Lin even used six defenders after conceding 5 goals, but still too weak for SIPG's oppressing tactics. Ma Lin himself had already experienced a similar 8-1 defeat in the previous season with Liaoning FC against Shanghai Shenhua. In the following two matches, Ma Lin used conservative 5-defender formation, putting Carrasco in the central forward position and fed him with long passes, but the results were unsatisfactory, as the