English and Italian football giants Manchester City, Chelsea, Inter Milan and Juventus will square up for pre-season friendlies in Hong Kong in August, the clubs announced on Tuesday.

Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, currently arm-wrestling Arsenal for the Premier League title, will take on Inter Milan on Saturday, August 1, spearheaded by their Norwegian goal machine Erling Haaland.

The match will kick off the “Hong Kong Football Festival” at the city’s futuristic 50,000-seat Kai Tak Stadium.

The gleaming arena opened a year ago, featuring a roof that can be closed and air-conditioning to combat the fierce summer heat and humidity in Hong Kong.

Chelsea will play Juventus on Wednesday, August 5, to round off the mini-tournament.

Inter, under former Romanian international Cristian Chivu, are eight points clear at the top of Serie A as they look for a 21st title, second only to Juventus who have won a record 36 Italian top-flight championships.

Juventus are fourth and looking to secure a Champions League spot under Luciano Spalletti.

Chelsea beat PSG to win the Club World Cup in the United States last year but have since parted company with then manager Enzo Maresca.

Liam Rosenior took charge but is under pressure to keep his job after Chelsea lost five of their last six Premier League matches to drop to sixth, seven points adrift of the Champions League places.

It remains to be seen whether Rosenior will still be in charge when Chelsea land in Hong Kong as they were also drubbed 8-2 on aggregate by PSG in the Champions League last 16.

All the teams will hold open training sessions ahead of the matches giving Hong Kong fans an extra chance to see star players such as City’s Gianluigi Donnarumma, Chelsea’s Cole Palmer, Inter’s Lautaro Martinez and Juventus’s Dusan Vlahovic.

The action does not stop there for fans in the football-mad southern Chinese city, as Bayern Munich and Aston Villa have already announced they will play a friendly in Hong Kong on Friday, August 7.

During pre-season last year, 50,000 sell-out crowds in Hong Kong watched Liverpool play AC Milan and Tottenham face Arsenal in the first north London derby outside of the UK.

Tens of thousands also turned out to watch the teams’ open training sessions.

Over 113,000 rugby fans turned out for the three-day Hong Kong Sevens, which ran from Friday to Sunday, with South Africa’s men’s team and New Zealand’s women’s team winning the championship titles.

In a press release on Sunday, the Hong Kong Sevens said 37,000 fans packed Kai Tak Stadium for the final day of the games, which reached a “thrilling crescendo” that evening.

South Africa’s men’s team made history with their first-ever victory at the Hong Kong Sevens, beating Argentina, as New Zealand’s women’s team secured their fourth Hong Kong Sevens title.

See also: Raucous partying and some rugby as Hong Kong Sevens turns 50

Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s men’s team won the Melrose Claymores – a competition held at the Sevens that focuses on Asian teams – for the third straight year after beating Japan 19-15.

However, Hong Kong’s women’s team did not reach the finals after losing to Thailand 14-24 on Saturday.

First held in the city in 1976, this year’s Hong Kong Sevens marked its 50th anniversary.

It was also the second year the competition was held at Kai Tak Stadium, the centrepiece of the city’s biggest sporting facility, Kai Tak Sports Park, which opened last year.

Chief Executive John Lee, who watched the Sevens on Sunday, said he spoke with overseas and mainland Chinese business representatives between matches. They praised the tournament and said they were “filled with confidence” about Hong Kong’s future development, he added.

“Hong Kong is committed to carrying forward the energy of the rugby sevens, showcasing our city’s charm and multiculturalism as a premier events capital,” he wrote in a Chinese-language post on Facebook.

The first Hong Kong Sevens took place in front of a few thousand curious spectators, and some of the players wore gym shoes in the mud instead of rugby boots.

Fast forward 50 years and the event has grown into a sold-out three-day festival of global repute, mixing sport with socialising, schmoozing and big business.

The runaway success of the Hong Kong Sevens played a key part in rugby returning to the Olympics at Rio 2016 after a 92-year absence.

France’s thrilling men’s sevens gold, inspired by home hero Antoine Dupont, was one of the standout moments of the Paris Games two years ago.

The Hong Kong extravaganza — where legends such as Jonah Lomu and David Campese played in the past — also had a central role in developing the rugby across Asia.

Speaking to AFP on Friday as Hong Kong’s biggest party kicked off, World Rugby chair Brett Robinson said there was nothing quite like it.

“It’s the pinnacle,” he said.

“Firstly, it’s sort of one of the pinnacle events in global sports, let alone rugby.

“It’s the jewel in the crown of our Sevens series.”

‘Really special’

Packed crowds with many flying in from overseas for the weekend are a far cry from when a group of club enthusiasts launched the event in 1976.

Now there are men’s and women’s sides from all over the globe, but then it was mostly teams from Asia and the Pacific in a one-day men’s tournament.

“It started as a bit of a jolly,” former Hong Kong Rugby Football Union president Brian Stevenson, who was involved at the start, once reflected.

A few of the Hong Kong players did not even have the proper footwear, and one of them was a policeman.

A 3,000 crowd packed Hong Kong Football Club to see New Zealand’s Cantabrians win the first Hong Kong Sevens.

“It was a kaleidoscope of colour, full of the pace and grace, thrills and spills and the glorious uncertainty that make seven-a-side rugby arguably the fastest and best ball game in sport,” local newspaper the South China Morning Post purred in its report at the time.

The seed was sown, and the tournament grew as a commercial and sporting success in tandem with Hong Kong’s development as a global financial centre.

The 40,000-capacity Hong Kong Stadium became the tournament’s home, with the South Stand in particular providing a raucous backdrop of well-oiled party-goers decked out in outrageous fancy dress.

After the Covid pandemic put a temporary spoiler on things, the tournament last year moved to the new US$3.85 billion Kai Tak stadium.

The 50,000-seat arena, which boasts a futuristic purplish facade and retractable roof, is purpose-built for rugby sevens with 24 separate changing rooms.

It is on the site of the old Kai Tak airport, famed for its hair-raising approach over the top of nearby housing estates.

Robinson said that when rugby was applying to become an Olympic sport again, delegations were shown Hong Kong to help stake its case for inclusion.

“It’s just really special in terms of the scale of it, the attendance rates, the momentum and the history of the tournament,” he said.