Homeless World Cup soccer tournament is beacon of hope for Hongkongers with troubled pasts
Annual soccer tournament is the chance of a lifetime for former drug addicts, alcoholics and rough sleepers. To earn a spot on the team headed for Mexico, players must show determination and growth on and off the field
On a soccer pitch in a cavernous Hong Kong shopping centre, a group of men lace up their trainers and change into matching jerseys. They get to work stretching, running drills and having a kick-around. Soon their shouts and the smack of soccer balls hitting the walls around the pitch echo past shopfronts and the centre’s last remaining shoppers.
Seyed Meeran Naina Marikar, 19, moves quickly across the pitch. He passes a ball back and forth with teammates, winds up for a kick, and watches as the ball soars past the goalkeeper and into the net.
Meeran is no stranger to Hong Kong’s shopping centres. He often slept in them during bouts of homelessness in his mid-teens. Tonight, however, Meeran is at the D Park shopping centre in Tsuen Wan for a different reason: to compete for a spot on the team representing Hong Kong in the 2018 Homeless World Cup.
There are nearly two dozen others like Meeran, all sprinting, high-kicking and dribbling balls. Strictly speaking, none are presently homeless – but all have experienced homelessness recently, or have struggled with various forms of addiction or run-ins with the law. Whatever their background, for most of the men a trip to Mexico City – where the competition will be held this November – would have seemed all but impossible until June, when the try-out season began.
Only eight men will make the final cut. But according to coaches and players even the try-outs present a can’t-miss opportunity to turn lives around.
“What is important is that the players grow,” says the team’s head coach, Eddie Wan Yuen-hung. “We tell them, ‘Try your best. Don’t think about the results’.”
