AJ Auxerre Signs Chinese Teen Wei Xiangxin on Five-Year Deal

AJ Auxerre have rolled the dice on one of Chinese football’s brightest young forwards, tying 18-year-old Wei Xiangxin to a five-year deal that underlines both the club’s faith and their need for fresh attacking spark.

The Ligue 1 side, who scraped to 15th last season and only just dodged the relegation play-offs, confirmed on Thursday that Wei has officially joined from Meizhou Hakka and will wear the No. 49 shirt.

“AJ Auxerre is very proud to announce the arrival of Xiangxin Wei. A great hope of Chinese football, he has signed a five-year contract and will wear number 49,” the club said in a statement that carried the weight of a long-planned move finally completed.

This was no bolt from the blue. Auxerre flagged their intentions back in November, revealing they had reached an agreement with Chinese Super League side Meizhou Hakka and would bring the Guangdong-born forward in as soon as he turned 18 and was eligible to sign his first professional contract in Europe.

They had already done their homework. Wei spent three weeks on trial at the club last year, long enough for Auxerre to see enough raw material to build around. The French side later said they would design a long-term training plan tailored to his profile, with the clear expectation that his ceiling lies far higher than his current résumé suggests.

On paper, the numbers from his club career are modest. Across two seasons with Meizhou in two different divisions, Wei scored one goal in 28 appearances, in a side that slid out of the Chinese Super League last November after winning just five of 30 league matches. He added another goal in this year’s Chinese FA Cup.

The real intrigue lies in his international record. For China’s under-17s between 2024 and 2025, Wei hit nine goals in just 12 appearances, a return that hints at a penalty-box instinct not yet fully unlocked at senior level. Auxerre, a club with a proud history of polishing rough diamonds, clearly believe they can be the ones to do it.

For a team that flirted dangerously with the drop, this is a calculated gamble: a long contract for a teenager arriving from a relegated side, backed not by what he has already done in a top league, but by what he might become. If the adaptation goes to plan and those under-17 numbers translate to Ligue 1, Auxerre’s survival fight could start to look very different.