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Football is unquestionably the most popular sport in Hong Kong - bars fill for live television matches, parks bustle morning, noon and night with games and avid gamblers indulge their urge to bet on the sport, only recently legally.

Despite all this, Hong Kong football has fallen a long way from its place at the forefront of the sport in Asia.

That Hong Kong was historically at football's vanguard should come as no surprise. The spread of the game can be plotted around the planet according to where British sailors and soldiers could be found in numbers in the late 1800s: From Porto and Barcelona in Europe to Montevideo in Uruguay to Hong Kong in Asia.

It is for the same reason that Dalian, with its position at the mouth of the Bohai Sea, has dominated Chinese soccer.

Hong Kong's most popular and successful club, South China, was born in 1904 as the Chinese Football Team (the club became the South China Athletic Association in 1920) to show the British colonialists that the Chinese could play sports as well as anyone.

The Hong Kong Football Association itself was founded in 1914 and its competitions are among the longest-running in Asia.

The annual Hong Kong-Macau Interport Cup dates back to 1937 and the league was first staged in 1945-46. One of the few to precede it was the Malaya (now Malaysia) Cup, which began in 1921.

The idea of forming a governing body for Asian football was first mooted at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, developed upon during the second Asian Games in Manila in 1954 and acted upon later the same year.

Hong Kong was among the founder members of the regional grouping and provided both the home and the leadership for the fledgling Asian Football Confederation, which this year has been celebrating its golden anniversary.

Hong Kong furnished the Confederation's secretariat with its home for the first 14 years, and in those years provided its first four presidents:  Sir Lo Man-kam,  Kwok Chan,  William Louey Sui-tak  and N.C. Chan.

Hong Kong also claims to be the first place in Asia  to have turned professional when five teams - Jardines, Sing Tao, Kowloon Motor Bus, Yuen Long and Rangers - registered 60 players as professionals for the 1968-69 season.

In the 1970s and '80s some of the biggest names in the sport were attracted to Hong Kong. Pele, Bobby Moore and George Best  were among the superstars to appear in exhibition matches. Others, including Dutch World Cup players such as Arie Haan  and Theo De Jong,  China's current coach and assistant coach, and former England international Tommy Hutchinson,  made it their final port of call at the end of glittering careers.

Despite this rich history, Hong Kong has had few truly memorable moments on the international stage.

However, few would argue about their greatest moment - a 1-0 defeat of China on May 19, 1985.  The result knocked the Chinese out of the World Cup qualifying competition, reportedly starting riots in Beijing. It is still  remembered simply by the numbers 05-19, both in Hong Kong and on the mainland.

The defeat is also seen as the catalyst for the modernisation of Chinese football, leading, among other things, to the formation of a genuine professional league in 1994. Ironically, it proved to be the zenith for the game in Hong Kong. By 1986 all the foreign superstars had gone. The league went completely local as the big money started to drift out of the sport.

'We had had this prosperity just like Japan. The tycoons came into football. But in the 1980s Bulova sold their watch division and gave up. Seiko pulled out in 1987. The crowds dropped and the players weren't challenged enough,' said Kwok Ka-ming,  the coach of the 1985 national team and the current technical adviser to the Hong Kong Football Association.

'The people running the game in the 1980s pulled out. Lawrence Yu  in 1984 and 1985 was one of the Hong Kong team managers, but then he got the Community Chest. In the 1990s it was different. Everybody was grabbing their money and going before the handover. The money was going out of Hong Kong.'

Today the league struggles on, with almost all matches played at the Mongkok Stadium and crowds only above  2,000 on special occasions.

For the 2001-02 season the first team from across the border - a youth team from the Guangzhou Xiangxue club - was invited to join. By 2003-04 the number had swollen to three, which, when coupled with the appearance of a Fire Services team, meant there were only six professional Hong Kong teams in the first division.



How HK took its eye off the ball