National Team
The Hong Kong national football team represents Hong Kong in international football events. The team competed their first international match in 1947 against South Korea during the colonial period. Even after 1997 the transfer of sovereignty to China, it continues to represent Hong Kong separately from the People's Republic of China as its own national team in international competitions due to the "One country, two systems" principle. The team has never qualified for the FIFA World Cup, the closing time was during the 1986 FIFA World Cup qualification, which is also marked as their most successful period between 1970s and 1980s.
Read more about this topic: Football In Hong Kong
Famous quotes containing the words national and/or team:
“Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.”
—Ida M. Tarbell (1857–1944)
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)