Cover Kai Tak will see four of the world's biggest football teams compete this August (Photo: Getty Images)
Kai Tak will see four of the world's biggest football teams compete this August (Photo: Getty Images)
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Hong Kong’s Kai Tak stadium will host the Hong Kong Football Fest, featuring Premier League and Serie A teams
I was in the room in April when the four names were read out: Manchester City, Inter Milan, Chelsea, Juventus. These were the four internationally renowned teams that would be travelling to Hong Kong at the end of July to take part in the second Hong Kong Football Fest at Kai Tak Stadium. Sitting there, even after years of covering these announcements, I felt something shift. The rumours had already prepared us for who was coming; what suddenly sunk in where it would all take place: Kai Tak Stadium. Eighteen months ago, none of it existed—not the room, not the pitch outside it, not the 50,000 seats banked around it, not the retractable roof that now shapes the Kowloon Bay skyline.
I’ve been to Kai Tak several times since it opened: for the Rugby Sevens, for Coldplay, now for this. Each visit still catches me slightly off guard: this is the same patch of land above which planes used to skim rooftops on their final approach into the old airport; the site of one of the world’s most famous flight path is now hosting four of European football’s biggest names in the space of a week.
The idea of an Olympic-standard stadium on the Kai Tak site had been floated by the government as far back as the 2000s, long before a single support beam went in. Construction didn’t start until 2019, then the pandemic pushed the target completion date back year after year, from 2023 to 2024 and finally to March 2025, when the park opened to the public. Six years from groundbreaking to opening is slow by international stadium standards; but for a city that had talked about a venue like this for two decades, the wait became part of the story.
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The city that kept losing the big ones
What makes Kai Tak’s rise land differently is what came before it. Hong Kong spent much of the last decade as the city that couldn’t quite hold onto marquee sport. Formula E raced along the Central Harbourfront for three seasons, from 2016 to 2019—a genuine calendar fixture, watched by a global motorsport audience—before it disappeared from the schedule and never returned. Anyone who lived through that stretch in Hong Kong remembers the pattern: an event lands here, builds a following, and then the calendar moves on to Marrakesh or Jakarta or wherever else was willing to pick up the slack.
That history is what makes this year’s Hong Kong Football Festival worth paying attention to, more than the star power alone. Last year’s debut edition, featuring Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspurs, Arsenal and AC Milan, drew more than 100,000 fans through the gates—a record-breaking number for a football event in this city. A second sold-out edition would turn that number from a highlight into a pattern.
This year, Manchester City play Inter Milan for the Asahi Super Dry Trophy on August 1, and Chelsea meet Juventus for the Herbalgy Trophy on August 5; the events bookend a week of open training sessions, fan zones and the kind of buzz around Kowloon that usually only accompanies a Cup Final.
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Kai Tak’s bookings reportedly run into 2027; in just over a year, the venue has hosted a rugby tournament with a century of history behind it, the World Snooker Grand Prix, some of the biggest music acts in the world, from Blackpink to Coldplay, K-pop’s mega Mama Awards show, and now four European football institutions in a single week. Few venues anywhere can claim that range in so short a stretch of time.
Next month, I‘ll be back in that stadium for the football; what’s got me buzzing isn’t City or Juventus, it’s what this venue proves Hong Kong can now do. We finally have a stadium built to a standard that can host anything: football, rugby, world tours, whatever comes next. HKFF is just the latest name on that list, and if the last year is any indication, it won’t be the last.
Pete Laverick is a sports and lifestyle journalist for Tatler Hong Kong. A former professional rugby player, he brings an athlete’s perspective to his coverage of the city’s sports and fitness scene. A committed fitness enthusiast, Pete is always testing something new—from Hyrox to marathons and triathlons—writing with the first-hand insight of someone who has lived at the top level of sport. He also has a standing invitation from Los Angeles Lakers owner Jeannie Buss to watch the Lakers at the Crypto.com Arena if he makes it to California.
