Pop star glamour and plans to ‘unite Sha Tin’: the newcomers shaking up Hong Kong football

Supreme Sha Tin poised for top-flight debut, as owner gets set to deliver on promise to ‘try things that have never happened in Hong Kong’

Armed with glamorous pop-star ambassadors, a multimillionaire owner and player, and plans to mobilise their roughly 700,000-strong community, Supreme Sha Tin are an audacious new addition to the Hong Kong Premier League.

Still, this being local football, very little about the club’s elevation has been straightforward. Racing to get their stadium up to snuff, they will begin their campaign housed at the rudimentary Hammer Hill Road Sports Ground; not a natural home for the glitzy live “Cantonese disco” performances that will be fixtures of the Supreme matchday experience.

Then there was the arrest in June on match-fixing charges of Lo Kwan-yee, the head coach who led Supreme to last season’s First Division title. The club is not implicated in the latest corruption probe to plague the city’s football scene, with Lo accused of offences from his time as boss of Citizen, but mud sticks.

“We’ve lost some sponsors and, financially, they haven’t been replaced,” Jim Wong Chi-chuen, the Supreme owner, told the South China Morning Post.

“The financial pressure on me is greater than I expected, but I want to push this forward and make it work. I’m trying to do something very pure.”

Since acquiring Supreme, in its previous guise as Sun Source, three years ago, Wong has sunk HK$5 million (around US$637,500) of his own cash into the club.