Kitchee not dwelling on AFC Elite Youth Academy recognition as club prioritises Hong Kong first team conveyor belt
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Five minutes. That’s all it took for Kitchee SC president Ken Ng Kin to get back to work after the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) officially recognised his youth academy as a one-star ‘Elite Youth Academy’ last month – the first and only in Hong Kong.
To be put in an exclusive tier alongside Asia’s best academies – and simultaneously helping the Hong Kong Football Association (HKFA) qualify as a full AFC ‘Elite Youth Scheme’ member – is worthy of praise, but the club is not distracted by trophies and accolades. Instead, it marches on with an overarching goal: to produce talent for the Hong Kong first team.
“We celebrated for about five minutes,” said Ng, who became Kitchee’s general manager in 2000 before taking over four years later. He recalled early discussions of building his own academy in 2009 after maxing out his government pitch quotas via club and school programmes.
“We’re not waving our flags now that we have the one star and saying we are therefore the best in Hong Kong and so on. That’s not the way we go. However, it does make some difference in that we want to know why we didn’t get two [stars].”
There are just three academies in Asia boasting a three-star AFC rating: South Korea’s Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors FC, Qatar’s Aspire Academy and Vietnam’s PVF Football Academy. The adjudicating panel reportedly assesses clubs on 20 different categories, including staff, facilities and philosophies.