AFC Champions League: Kitchee’s Dejan Damjanovic wants to help Hong Kong restore pride on Asian stage

Prolific Kitchee striker Dejan Damjanovic is on a mission to raise the profile of Hong Kong football when the champions take on their group J opponents in the AFC Champions League (ACL) starting this week.

Kitchee in Thailand on Sunday and were heading to Buriram, where they face China’s Guangzhou Evergrande, Japan’s Cerezo Osaka and Thailand’s FC Port in a double round-robin group competition.

The 39-year-old Montenegrin has scored a stunning 17 goals in 14 games since joining Kitchee in February and knows he needs two goals from these six ACL games to become the competition’s all-time leading goal scorer. He also wants to help Hong Kong reclaim some of its prestige as a regional football power.

“When I came here, I can tell you it’s not that bad,” said Damjanovic, who has 36 goals in the ACL – one fewer than South Korean record holder Lee Dong-gook. “People are looking really low and bad about us, on our league and our quality so this is one of the reasons I’m telling you we need to do well in the ACL.

“We need to kind of change this opinion from people in Asia. I think they are having a really low opinion of us so I want to change this and show them that the Hong Kong league is not bad at all. There’s a lot of quality players who are here. They are doing really well so this is why we need to step up and do good things in this group stage in Thailand.”

Hong Kong were among the stronger teams in Asia during the 1950s and ’60s and were the first domestic league, in the ’70s, to import foreign professionals from Europe. However, standards have dropped since the mid-’80s and Japan, South Korea, China and Middle Eastern nations have overtaken the city at senior level and with their domestic competitions.