Football at the 1980 Summer Olympics

1980 Men's Olympic football tournament

Tournament details
Host country	Soviet Union
Dates	20 July – 2 August 1980
Teams	16 (from 5 confederations)
Venue(s)	5 (in 4 host cities)
Final positions
Champions	Czechoslovakia (1st title)
Runners-up	East Germany
Third place	Soviet Union
Fourth place	Yugoslavia
Tournament statistics
Matches played	32
Goals scored	82 (2.56 per match)
Attendance	1,821,624 (56,926 per match)
Top scorer(s)	Sergey Andreyev (5 goals)
← 1976 1984 →

The football tournament at the 1980 Summer Olympics started on 20 July and ended on 2 August. Only one event, the men's tournament, was contested. Seven qualified countries did not participate, joining the American-led boycott in protest of the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.^[1]

Sixteen teams were divided into four groups:

• Group A (USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, Zambia)
• Group B (Colombia, Kuwait, Nigeria, Czechoslovakia)
• Group C (Algeria, Spain, GDR, Syria)
• Group D (Costa Rica, Finland, Iraq, Yugoslavia)

In the technical report following the competition, FIFA reported that: "Compared with the 1979 World Youth Tournament in Japan and the 1978 World Cup finals in Argentina, the standard of football at the Olympic Football Tournament was generally of an inferior quality,".^[2]

The tournament was primarily hosted by Moscow and Leningrad in the Russian SFSR, with some group stage games in Kiev, Ukrainian SSR and Minsk, Byelorussian SSR.