Crisis in Hong Kong football: the family behind city’s multimillion-dollar money pit
For three generations the Fok family have been intimately involved in running the game in the city
Not for the first time in the past decade, football in Hong Kong seemingly finds itself at something of a crossroads.
From match-fixing to crowds of fewer than 80, the domestic game is professional in name only. And despite isolated high points under former head coach Jorn Andersen, the representative team has been on a decades-long slide to the wrong end of the Fifa rankings.
The man in charge
According to his secretary, Eric Fok Kai-shan “has a packed schedule”, which is why the chairman of the Football Association of Hong Kong, China (HKFA) is rarely available to answer questions.
In the 12 months since he was elected unopposed to the position, Fok, who was made a director of the HKFA board in 2015 at just 32 years old, has dodged, ducked and dived from almost every opportunity to chat about the state of the game.
Domestically, the sport is again dealing with alleged match-fixing and corruption, has just nine teams in a Premier League that struggles to attract more than a handful of spectators, and, despite the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars invested over the past decade, is slipping further into irrelevance.
The limited facilities that exist are poorly maintained, and talk of developing a “dedicated football training centre”, first raised years ago in the HKFA’s Vision 2025 blueprint, has gone quiet.
The city’s senior men’s representative team has no head coach, after Andersen resigned in May. There was no succession plan in case of Andersen’s departure, according to interim CEO Charles Cheung Yim-yau, who was installed after the sacking the same month of Joaquin Tam Chau-long following a chaotic three years in post.
A family affair
