Opinion | Will Kai Tak Sports Park really be the great panacea to solve all of Hong Kong’s sporting ills?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know the Kai Tak project is an expensive, expansive and hugely ambitious project to develop a state-of-the-art sporting complex that will consist of a 50,000-seat stadium as well as two further 4,000- and 5,000-capacity arenas on 28 hectares of Hong Kong harbourfront. In 2023.

Until then the Hong Kong public will just have make do with a second best array of events, whilst casting envious glances north to Shanghai, east to Tokyo and, most painfully, south to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. All of which have been rapaciously adding to their shiny collection of blue ribband spectacles in recent years.

Each of those cities was rated as having a far superior portfolio to our own in a recent analysis of Hong Kong’s major sports event calendar.

Hong Kong is missing out badly. Certainly for a city with its vast resources.

The report, jointly commissioned by financial services company KPMG and sports networking group BOSN, attempts to paint the glass as half full; when the number bods had crunched a whole heap of figures and their weighted metrics were calculated, Hong Kong emerged as a regional leader in many of the areas that are supposed to fertilise a fecund sporting environment.