Hong Kong’s Lionel Messi disaster certainly made an impression. How long will it take to live it down?
- Hubris of Miami match’s organisers has been exposed by sporting realities: athletes do get injured, and a tight schedule was asking for trouble
- Event leaves fans feeling ripped off and is an unflattering advert for the city, but those who awarded it public money have questions to answer too
Reputation, be it in the world of business, sport or personally, is everything, and once lost can take an age to get back, if at all.
Hong Kong’s, as an influential city that hosts events of global renown, was hard-won, and has been hard to regain after the events of the past several years.
Officials are keen to raise that international profile still further, and the arrival of Lionel Messi – the world’s best footballer of his or, arguably, any generation – with his club Inter Miami should have done wonders.
Alongside the rugby sevens, the Tatler Xfest, of which the game against a Hong Kong XI formed a significant part, had the potential to become a pillar of the city’s social and sporting calendar for years to come.
Instead, it lies in ruins, an effigy to poor organisation, bad communication and the hubris of those who simply had no idea what they were doing.
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Messi mania as football superstar arrives in Hong Kong
If they had, they would have known professional athletes get injured, they would have known to under-promise and over-deliver, and they would have known that shoehorning an exhibition game between three real preseason friendlies was asking for trouble.
But having spent weeks guaranteeing that the US club’s marquee players – Messi, Luis Suarez, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba – would perform as advertised, Tatler is now being asked how it could be so completely unaware the star attraction was sitting it out.
And if indeed they were as surprised and disappointed as the rest of us, and Inter Miami have played the entire city for fools, what does that say about the stunning levels of naivety at play? Is it better to be ignorant or incompetent?
At the best of times, exhibition games are not quality affairs but pale imitations of what fans have seen their heroes do on TV, in contests that actually count for something. They are rarely mega events, and it pays not to oversell them.
Tatler’s mess, at HK$4,880 for the most expensive ticket, was the very definition of oversold; even its prematch boasts of “an all-star line-up of unparalleled greats of the game” and a “first-of-its-kind tour” stretched credulity to breaking point. As it turned out, it couldn’t even provide Suarez.
Local football association chairman Eric Fok Kai-shan was at it, too, telling Tatler the match “highlights our city’s exceptional ability to host these massive sporting events”.
The Hong Kong government is hardly blameless. The HK$16 million of taxpayer cash handed over without consideration for worst-case scenarios, and with an obvious flaw in the final contract, does not reflect well on those responsible.
Expressing anger because “Tatler didn’t tell us either” also smacks of passing the buck, rather than shouldering some of the blame.
The problem of course is the knock-on effect: the sound of 40,000 angry fans loudly booing at the end was broadcast around the world. A PR disaster available in 4K HD, courtesy of Apple TV’s MLS Season Pass, and with edited highlights playing on repeat on the BBC and CNN.
There are those who delight in making Hong Kong look small, and the city’s events industry has been making it easy for them of late.
Sunday’s incident was not the first example of a sporting occasion that was embarrassingly bad, it is just the most high-profile one. Tatler is not the only one who should be facing some tough questions; the city’s Major Sports Events Committee that hands out “M” Mark status to mega events, and millions of dollars in grants, has some explaining to do as well.
They also backed the unknown local organisers behind the World Rallycross Championship stop in the city, and that was hardly a beacon of excellence.
All this of course goes back to the start. There appears to be a misapprehension within Hong Kong that anyone with an office and a phone can organise a major sport event, and get handed significant amounts of government money to do so, without having the reputation to back it up.
Hong Kong should have good sporting stories to tell, it should be a place major sporting events are held, and it should have a reputation for doing so. At the moment that reputation is tarnished, and one wonders how long it will take to undo the damage.
