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. Sixteen teams were divided into four groups: 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". 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.

Venues

The football tournament was the most attended event on these Olympics: 1,821,624 spectators watched 32 matches of it at the stadiums.

Qualification

Due to the American-led boycott, countries (in brackets) who qualified did not enter the final tournament. Spain sent a team under the IOC flag. The following 16 teams qualified for the 1980 Olympics football tournament:

Match officials

Squads

Final tournament

First round

Group A

Group B

Group C

Group D

Bracket

Quarter-finals

Semi-finals

Bronze Medal match

Gold Medal match

The final was played in a hard rain for the third straight Olympics. Both teams played with ten players after the 58th minute after one player from each team was red-carded.

Medalists

Goalscorers

With five goals, Sergey Andreyev of Soviet Union was the top scorer of the tournament. In total, 82 goals were scored by 52 different players, with only one of them credited as own goal.

Final ranking

Below the final ranking after the end of the tournament.