Winning the World Cup

Seoul World Cup Stadium as seen from the Oil Tank Culture Park.

“This is a victory for us and a loss for Japan,” Kim Ga-young, an official with Korea’s World Cup bidding committee, told the Reuters news agency in Seoul. “The Japanese were all along against the idea of co-hosting, but they accepted it at the last minute. We won.”

“This is the worst-case scenario,” Kenji Mori, managing director of Japan’s professional J League, told Reuters in Tokyo, while one of the league’s coaches, Yasuhiko Okudera, said, “It’s going to be terrible, but we have to think positive.”

A quarter of a century ago, on 31 May 1996, the nations with the two strongest bids to host the 2002 World Cup were asked to do FIFA a favour. The global federation, not for the first time, had put itself in an awkward position through political manoeuvres and internal division, and choosing between the two was considered a more than usually delicate matter. Thus were two ornery neighbours, having spent tens of millions of dollars trying to persuade FIFA delegates that the other bid was inferior and/or unworkable, compelled to set aside their mutual antagonism and join forces in the interests of the first ever World Cup in Asia. Yes, the unthinkable: to co-host. The above quotes from the following day’s New York Times made me chuckle.

Several things were unclear at this point. Japan had never made it to the finals before, while South Korea had made four appearances. Would both countries qualify automatically as hosts? Would North Korea be involved, in the interests of reunification? Which country would stage the final? Not to mention the hundreds of other logistical and financial concerns about the organization of the event. The South Korean president Kim Young-Sam said, “The co-hosting of the 2002 World Cup between South Korea and Japan will be an opportunity to further solidify friendly relations.” Which was more optimistic than most. [To read much more about the bid and K-J relations, try this excellent article.]

In May 1996, the reigning Korean and Asian champions were Ilhwa Chunma, the club owned by Sun Myung-Moon (founder of the “Moonies”, a.k.a. the Unification Church). They had been playing home games at the Dongdaemun Stadium in east-central Seoul, as had the other two capital-based teams, LG Cheetahs and Yukong Elephants. However, the governing body, with government support, decided that, to encourage the spread of the game throughout the country, the Seoul teams would be banished from the city limits. They could come back if they constructed a football-specific stadium themselves. (Such top-down control was normal in Korean professional football: since its beginnings in 1983 there had been a regional franchise system in place.) Thus Ilhwa Chunma were now officially known as Cheonan Ilhwa Chunma and based 90km down the road. The Elephants had moved to Bucheon (well, Mokdong, while the Bucheon stadium was being built), and Cheetahs were now to be found in Anyang. Since the latter two locations were just 25km from Dongdaemun, one could question how far the game was really being spread by this decision.

Six years to the day after the FIFA decision was taken, the competition kicked off with a match between defending world and European champions France, and unfancied debutants Senegal, in the Seoul World Cup Stadium. It was Senegal’s first World Cup finals appearance, and the biggest day in the country’s footballing history. A memorable result ensued, thanks to a goal from the late Pape Bouba Diop.

Yet the South Korean capital, home to almost half of the country’s population, would host only two further matches in the tournament: the group game between Turkey and China and the semi-final which saw South Korea’s improbable run come to an end at the hands of the Germans. This paucity of games was because there were nine other cities in South Korea, besides the ten in Japan, which fulfilled hosting duties. France in 1998 had managed to accommodate the same number of matches with ten venues altogether. So the capital’s fans did not witness in person their team beat Poland and Portugal (in Busan and Incheon), nor their incredible knockouts of Italy (Daejeon) and Spain (Gwangju). Senegal scored possibly the best team goal, in Daegu against Denmark. Seogwipo saw Roberto Carlos’ free-kick against China. Suwon got to see Brazil 5, Costa Rica 2. Ulsan saw Dario Rodriguez’s volley and Rivaldo’s play-acting – in the space of three days. Now that’s what I call spreading the game around the country.

FC Seoul is the current incarnation of LG Cheetahs, mentioned earlier. Their move back to the capital was the outcome of a rather shoddy process in 2004: the KFA and the city of Seoul wanted a tenant for the stadium and offered incentives to lure back a provincial club (which, since 1996, was all of the clubs). After an unsuccessful attempt to launch a new club, eventually LG moved its footballing arm from Anyang. (Just like Bucheon locals after the Jeju United fiasco, the people of Anyang formed a new team to replace the club that was stolen from them. FC Anyang currently compete in K2.) Since moving into the Seoul stadium, the club has added three league titles to the three it won as the Cheetahs, but has often struggled for the success which its home and its financial backing demand. In FC Seoul’s last title-winning season, for example, the ground was over half full only twice, for the visits of traditional arch-rivals Suwon Samsung Bluewings. They almost got relegated in 2018 and finished ninth out of twelve in 2020.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the Korean venues built for the occasion are now white elephants. The football clubs of Incheon, Daegu and Gwangju no longer use the World Cup stadiums in their cities and have moved into less cavernous premises. One club had to be moved the length of the country and across the sea to make use of Seogwipo’s massive empty orange structure, and on a really good day attracts 15% of its capacity. But Seoul’s biggest sporting venue is still in regular use for football, and it is a magnificent sight. I’ve been to watch three FC Seoul matches now: one Asian Champions League fixture, on a pre-Covid winter evening, against a limited Malaysian side; the second a totally underwhelming pin-drop-atmosphere mid-pandemic K-League affair against who-cares; and most recently (and memorably) a cup match against upstart local rivals Seoul E-Land, the first ever meeting of the two sides, from which the K2 visitors emerged victorious. However, the stewards enforced the Covid-related ban on away supporters by expelling any furtive E-Land fans in short order, meaning that only the neutrally-attired, silently smug ones could remain to enjoy the occasion.

The dedicated metro station, on line 6 and handy for the expat hub of Itaewon, opened in 2000. There’s a weird little concrete amphitheatre at the exit, perhaps for fans to gather, and, at the top of the escalator, just before you hit the club shop and a cafe where you can buy a branded FC Seoul americano, there is that holy grail of Korean outings, a well-appointed convenience store. It’s a GS25, naturally, operated by the sister company of LG which still owns the football club, and it has the exact requirements for a good ‘marting’ experience: picnic benches outside, away from busy roads, and 4 cans of good local beer for man won ($10). The ideal matchday preparation. There is also a supermarket, a mall, a cinema, a sauna where you can stay the night, and a football museum, all on site.

Here is a selection of rubbish photos from my AFC and FA Cup visits…

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Getting soaked with the Bu-boys

Bucheon 1995 FC v Jeonnam Dragons. K League 2.

Saturday 20 March 2021, 1.30pm

Bucheon Sports Complex, Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province.

It’s a wet day. Very wet. But the wet is coming down not in wet torrents but Lancastrian style, in wet droplets and wet mist. The club are giving away white disposable rain ponchos on entry – you qualify once you’ve passed through the ticket check, temperature check and Covid QR check. But I’ve brought a brolly, a decision I am doubly glad of later when I see all the ponchos dumped in bins, ready to join the rest of this country’s unholy quantity of single-use plastics in some unsuspecting ocean.

The incongruously large stadium, which holds 34,000 and was completed in 2001, is conveniently located right outside the exit of Bucheon Sports Complex metro station. A 40-minute ride west from my place, Bucheon itself is on first impressions an undistinguished new suburb, although it’s administratively in Gyeonggi province, not Seoul proper, and not a suburb but a separate new town. Looks the same to me.

The club shop sells a variety of old shirts, which are nicer than the current one and have actual Korean lettering on, at relatively reasonable prices, along with trinkets and scarves, plus pop and instant noodles, since this is the first stadium I’ve been to that doesn’t have a big-chain convenience store on site.

As it appears that my companion will be delayed by the rainy-day traffic, I leave his ticket at the ticket office with a very kind and earnest young person who speaks English. On my way into the ground I am accosted (politely) by a foreign-looking man with a camera, who turns out to be Lex, a photographer for K League United, the official English-language partner of the competition. Although he is going to at least one more match later today, the weather makes a decent turnout unlikely, so Lex is desperate to get some footage of overseas visitors, however uninteresting they may be. I chuckle in embarrassment as, like all right-thinking humans, I hate this stuff, but confident I can guarantee that, as always, I will be uninteresting. I reluctantly give him two minutes of masked and monotonous spiel about why I’m here, let out one more embarrassed chuckle and carry on inside to watch the game kick off.

Bucheon SK began life as Yukong Elephants, owned by the giant company SK Energy, under which identity they played in various parts of the greater Seoul area. The club won the league in 1989 (when there were only six teams) and moved to Bucheon city in 1995; the league had decided to distribute the franchises more evenly around the country, which necessitated shifting a few teams away from the capital. Then, suddenly, in 2006 the parent company SK Energy whisked the club away to the holiday island of Jeju, where there was a big stadium lying empty, renamed and rebadged it.

Thus we have that rare thing in the conglomerate-dominated Korean scene, a phoenix club. Locals founded a new, municipal-owned entity after the theft of their club, and Bucheon FC 1995 debuted in the third tier, K3, in 2008. Five years later they went professional and joined K2, where they’ve been ever since. (Read more on this complicated history here.)

My umbrella does me just fine for the entire first half in one of two open, temporary stands situated on top of the running track. Some football happens sporadically in the first half, but not so much that my friend misses out too badly by arriving at half time. Bucheon open the scoring with a goal that is equal parts well-worked and poorly-defended, Jang Hyun-soo’s low cross finding Park Chang-joon unattended in the box. I nearly miss it because I am trying to navigate my friend to the ground from whatever deserted field he has found himself in.

Ten minutes later the home defence have their own moments to forget: first Oleg Zoteev smartly robs the full-back on the touchline, then Samuel Nnamani’s shot is parried weakly by error-prone goalie Jeon Jong-hyeok to the feet of Lee Jong-ho, who pokes in the equalizer. Zoteev is a solid and venerable-looking Uzbek wing-back who gets up and down the flank and looks very lively. Samuel is a powerful striker from Nigeria, who arrived in Korea after three seasons in Serbia and two in Sweden. Up front with him is the obligatory unknown Brazilian, Alex, who has Japanese third division pedigree. Captain Lee Jong-ho has returned to the club he served with distinction for five years before short spells with two of the country’s best teams, Jeonbuk and Ulsan, with whom he won a Champions League and an FA Cup, respectively. Wikipedia tells me he was dubbed the “Gwangyang Rooney” when he broke through into the Dragons first team as a highly-rated teenage tearaway.

Jeonnam Dragons were Chunnam Dragons until 2014, before modifying their spelling to fit the current dominant transliteration scheme. The club is named after its province, Jeollanam-do, or South Jeolla, in the far south-west of the peninsula. The modest coastal city of Gwangyang is home to the country’s biggest steel plant and the club is owned by steel giant POSCO. The Dragons are three-time FA Cup winners and were ever-present in the top division from their foundation in 1995 until the shock of relegation in 2018, from which they are still trying to recover.

It’s mostly down to sub-optimal finishing, generally with the head but on one egregious occasion on the volley, that no goals are scored in a dry second half. The season is yet young, but these two look destined for mid-table finishes to me. The wonderfully close-quarters matchgoing experience, drizzle notwithstanding, and the purchase of that lovely and only slightly out-of-date Bucheon shirt, mean I’ll be back for more…

Up K2 in winter

Seoul E-Land v Gimcheon Sangmu

Saturday 6 March 2021, 4.00pm.

Olympic Stadium, Jamsil, Seoul (aka Leoul Park). Ticket price ￦10,000 (US$10).

K League 2, Round 2.

The new K-League season took me by surprise. Strict social distancing restrictions have been in place for more than two months, limiting social gatherings to four people, but it’s OK to have a few thousand people gather in a football stadium.

And what a stadium it is.

The approach from temperature test to ticket check.

“Physical Fitness is National Power.”

Seoul’s bid to host the Olympic Games began in 1979. Authoritarian president Park Chung-Hee wanted to show off the country’s dramatic economic development, “establish diplomatic relationships and weld the nation together”, no less. With the above mantra, Park was also interested in putting on a display of sporting prowess to show what South Korea’s people were made of. By the time the bid was formally presented two years later, the dictator had been assassinated, and his interim successor overthrown by a coup which reinstated military rule. In response to nationwide pro-democracy protests, new president Chun Doo-hwan imposed martial law, and the brutality of the government’s response was displayed most horrifically by the killing of hundreds of civilians by soldiers in Gwangju – a massacre tacitly condoned by the US government at the height of Cold War tensions.

The Games and the Stadium

The Jamsil Sports Complex is a giant, unromantic car park broken up by a sprinkling of concrete ovals. (Or, if you are a firm of architects bidding to redevelop the area, it “is an archipelago and its stadiums are a constellation of islands”.) Jamsil was itself a sparsely populated island until, in the early 1970s, the south bank of the river Han (“Gangnam” in Korean) began to be developed in earnest. The population of Seoul proper, north of the river, had doubled between 1960 and 1970, to over five million people, and overcrowding was a serious problem. Construction of housing and infrastructure across the Han began apace, and the sports complex was started even before the Games were awarded. By the time the main, multi-purpose Olympic stadium was opened two years later, it was joining a baseball stadium, a boxing gym, a basketball arena and a swimming pool in the rapidly growing complex. Other venues, and the athletes’ village, were built 5km down the road at the Olympic Park.

The capital area’s population doubled again to ten million by the mid-’80s. Over the next couple of years, a new riverside expressway and several subway lines were completed, connecting the Jamsil area to the airport, the city centre and the burgeoning hub of Gangnam. A nearby district boasted the tallest building outside North America. The Asian Games of 1986 were hosted as a dry-run for the big one.

North Korea tried, unsuccessfully, to secure co-hosting rights to the Olympics and then tried, unsuccessfully, to organize a boycott. In the meantime Kim Il-Sung’s regime launched a series of deadly terror attacks on South Korean targets in 1983-87. One of these was an attempted assassination of president Chun, in which several cabinet ministers were killed. Another was the downing of Korean Air flight 858 from Baghdad to Seoul, in which all 115 people on board lost their lives.

The 1980s continued to be an eventful decade for Koreans. In the South, increasingly vocal protests in favour of constitutional reform, and against torturing students to death, led to the announcement in June 1987 that direct presidential elections would be held and that the regime would accede to most of the opposition’s demands. Although Chun’s right-hand man won the presidency in December, the ruling party lost control of the National Assembly. Suddenly, South Korea was a democratic, pluralist country, just in time to appear on the global stage at its own Olympic coming-out party.

The Games did their job of presenting South Korea to the world as a modern, developed nation, and arguably also of deterring the authorities from backsliding into dictatorial habits. It also got me into watching sport, and my earliest sporting memories are from this event. We chatted in the school playground about Greg Louganis banging his head on the diving board. I watched some weightlifting. I can still picture Flo-Jo and her extraordinary fingernails. People in Great Britain, including me, were temporarily interested in hockey. But overshadowing all this was a ten-second spell which can still lay claim to being the most famous Olympic moment of all time, and it all took place right here near where I’m sitting.

The ticket, the cheerleaders, the running track, the Olympic torch tower thingy…

Look beyond the pit where the world’s greatest athlete, Carl Lewis, retained his long-jump title. Across the field where skyscraping Soviet superman Sergei Bubka pole-vaulted six metres into the air. Over on the far side, where the dugouts are today, is the stretch of running track where, on 24 September 1988, the world watched agog as Canada’s Ben Johnson absolutely smashed the men’s 100m world record. The rest is history, as sport’s most famous drug scandal unfolded over the next few days. Subsequent suspicions over other athletes suggest that he may have just been the unlucky one who got caught, but for a child growing up in the self-anointed Fair-Play Capital of the World™ (England, of course), the name of Ben Johnson was scratched permanently into the mud, next to that of the late great cheating bastard El Diego.

The Olympic Stadium has a capacity of just under 70,000 these days. The Olympic torch is still proudly erect in one corner of the ground. It’s a grand venue and no mistake. But the old place hasn’t been used for big football matches since the World Cup Stadium (20km across town) was completed in 2000. These days its occupants are rather modest, although they do pack a commercial punch and have a terrifically loud PA system.

Lair of the Leopard

Seoul E-Land FC’s history goes all the way back to 2014. At that time it became the metropolis’s second professional football club, and the first to be tenants of the Olympic Stadium. The club is owned by retail conglomerate E-Land. Given the catchment area – a million people live within 5 km – this is a club with potential. But E-Land have spent all their six years in the second tier, finishing bottom twice, saved from relegation only by the fact that there isn’t any. After a dismal 2019 season the Leopards’ squad was completely overhauled and a new coach brought in: Chung Jung-yong, who had led the South Korean Under-20 national team to the World Cup final that summer. 2020 saw considerable improvement, as the team only missed out on the promotion play-offs on the last day. Brazilian journeyman Leandro, who has previously played in Georgia, Israel and Moldova, topped the goals and assists charts for the club last year and is still expected to be the main creative force of the team. The club have just signed a former Boca Juniors trainee, fresh from the Argentine second tier, by the name of Nicolás Benegas.

We stride to our socially distanced seats, clutching our freebies (a giant ugly poster, a thin scarf, a clacker thingy made out of folded card with the squad pictures on, and some hand sanitiser), just as the cheerleading squad are on stage in front of us, introducing themselves to the denizens of the East Stand. The smiling girls in hotpants and their encouraging dance moves offset (slightly) the high-decibel insistence of the cheermaster that everyone join in the strictly regimented chants, claps and waves throughout the play.

The knowledgeable folks at K League United (go there any time you want some proper analysis) assured us pre-season that today’s visitors, Gimcheon Sangmu, were favourites to win the division. Under the name of Sangju Sangmu they finished 4th in K1 last year, and would have gone into the Asian Champions League draw if they had not been relegated to K2 for moving city. (Gimcheon is 35km away from Sangju in the centre of the country.) Sangmu is unique in South Korea as it is the team of the army: its players represent the club for two seasons while completing their compulsory military service, and then move on. The bulk of the team that did so well in 2020 is still there, and indeed has been reinforced with some high-quality signings. However, slightly depleted by injuries, they could only draw at Ansan Greeners last week, while E-Land secured an unexpected 3-0 win at newly relegated Busan I-Park.

An Actual Game of Football

The visitors start fairly confidently but fail to trouble the home goalkeeper. Twenty minutes in, an E-Land corner from the right misses all heads and Kim Jin-hwan finds himself in space with only the ball for company. He controls it and strikes it into the far corner of the net and it’s one-nil to the underdogs! At this point Gimcheon wake up, string together some good passing moves and create a few good chances, but they remain behind at half-time. The unnecessarily loud noise from the cheermaster has scarcely let up since we arrived, which is intensely annoying. And he insists on saying, theatrically, “Nice shooting,” every time a player misses the target, which is mildly annoying. (OK, full disclosure: I am hung over. Plus, it’s the coldest 7°C I’ve ever experienced and I am underdressed.)

The army lads start the second half with attack after attack, and a goal looks inevitable, but still they can’t put away a chance. By seventy minutes it’s all beginning to look like a rope-a-dope ploy by the hosts to let Gimcheon tire themselves out – quite a gamble on the conscripts’ finishing skills. Then E-Land’s young wing-back Hwang Tae-hyeon robs a sluggish midfielder and goes on a somewhat hesitant dribble, which looks totally unthreatening right up until the moment Benegas receives the ball in the box and slams it left-footed into the net. The Gimcheon players do indeed look knackered at this point. Although they immediately manage to force a save up the other end, after 79 minutes their own keeper comes for an out-swinging cross and, unchallenged, feebly palms it down in the centre of the penalty area. Benegas is again in the right place at the right time. He collects the ball, swivels, and sidefoots it calmly out of the goalie’s reach into the bottom corner, with his right this time. (If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, you’re thinking that Benegas sounds like a European energy supplier. And you’re right. He may not have a lot of gas himself but he’s got a good engine. Etc.)

Two minutes later, another Tae-hyeon ball into the area is politely left alone by a defender, and substitute Kim Jeong-hwan is only too happy to stretch and divert the ball into the goal. Stoppage time sees Jeong-hwan hit the crossbar with another shot, but E-Land have to settle for the already generous and scarcely believable margin of four-nil.

Four-nil! The crowd is delirious. The customary bows by the team after the end of the game are warmly applauded and the optimism is cranked up a notch before we march stiffly to the metro station to try to warm up.

Hwang Tae-hyeon was the captain of the U-20 team that reached the world cup final, and the Seoul defence also boasts Lee Sang-min, captain of the U-23s who won the Asian title last year. Leadership quality abounds. Jang Yun-ho has been involved with three K1 title-winning Jeonbuk teams. And with Benegas’ presence up front now added to the verve of Leandro, could this finally be the year of the Leopard?

The -eongnam derby

Seongnam v Gyeongnam

Sun 24 November 2019, 2.00pm.

K League 1, round 37.

Tancheon Sports Complex, Seongnam.

Ticket price: ￦10,000.

Official attendance: 2,484.

It’s ten minutes to kick-off before I see anyone who looks like they’re going to the game. Admittedly I’m running late, having only decided at the last minute that I ought to get my first K-League experience out of the way, and I’m striding through the drizzle, past a bus with that one young lad in a black football shirt inside. I’ve spent half an hour on the metro out to Pangyo and then contrived to miss two consecutive number 76 buses, either of which would have taken me to the stadium in plenty of time. Nobody else here is on their way to a top division fixture.

When I get to it, at one minute to two, the stadium complex is pretty impressive, despite the weather: it’s smart, black and modern. There are four or five food trucks on the pavement, with a small club shop and a kiddies’ pitch on the way into the ground. I join the dozen people milling around at the ticket office and, after a quick glance at the plan, pay 10,000 won to sit in the East Stand. I hope it’s covered, as I haven’t brought an umbrella.

I needn’t have worried. The Tancheon Sports Complex stadium is very well-appointed and the East Stand has a roof which lets in only quite a bit of the rain water, which the council cleaners will mop up at half time. A running track between me and the pitch is a pet hate, but it doesn’t have as much of a dampening effect as the one at Dinamo Bucharest. Possibly because it’s blue. Children make up around half of the crowd in this part of the ground; it’s Fan Appreciation Day, with freebies, giveaways, dancing and “fun” for all the family. But that, like the mopping, can wait till the break. For now the kids are eating, chanting, and clapping the special folded-cardboard fixture list-cum-clapper thing we all got given on entry. Away to my left there is a corner of about fifty enthusiastic travelling Gyeongnam fans clad in red. It’s quite a trek, four hours by bus from the city of Changwon, in the far south-east of the country.

Their counterparts, the home ultras, occupy a small temporary stand erected right behind the goal at the north end. There’s a large bird emblem which rises and flashes its eyes behind them every so often. Which is cool. As these guys and girls are not under cover, the effect of the black replica shirts is heavily diluted by a number of white rain ponchos, but the dreich certainly doesn’t dampen their spirits.

What does do that is an early goal from the visitors, who are politely and generously invited by the home defence to create a simple chance and shoot. Gyeongnam have only this game and the next to save themselves from relegation, and they have started today like they have no intention of getting reacquainted with the second tier. Seongnam have already secured their own top-flight status and have nothing to play for except pride and the fans. And when did that ever motivate anyone?

Seongnam FC is a traditional power of the South Korean game, having been created by Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church (the “Moonies”) in the late 1980s. At the time it was based in Seoul and called Ilhwa Chunma. (The fact that my translation app puts that name into English as “Anecdotal Horse” is disquieting, and not only because it doesn’t mention the crucial aspect that Chunma is a flying horse.) They won three league titles and the Asian Club Championship in the mid-1990s. After an unhappy stint in Cheonan, the club was moved again in 2000 to Seongnam, a modern satellite city of the capital which has around a million inhabitants. Oddly, the Wikipedia articles for both Seongnam and Changwon (home of today’s opponents) claim that each was the first planned city in South Korea. I’m not going to check.

Four more league championships followed in those early Seongnam years, and then a second continental title in 2010, before Moon’s death led to the club’s being put up for sale in 2013. The city council agreed to take it over; they changed the name to Seongnam FC and the colours from yellow to black. At the same time the magpie, an extremely common bird in Korea and considered to represent good fortune, was adopted as the club mascot. Seongnam Sports Complex, which hosted hockey games at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, is too big and, apparently, run-down nowadays, so since 2005 the team have played at the smaller Tancheon. The ground was opened in 2002, though not for the World Cup, as its capacity is only 16,000. The stadium announcer occasionally tries to whip up a chant, but whenever our guys are chanting “Seong-nam” the other lot are chanting “Gyeong-nam,” so they’re cancelling each other out and it’s all a bit pointless.

The surface is wet and some of the players make ill-advised attempts at flashy manoeuvres in defence, but gradually the home team get a grip on the play. Their equaliser as half-time approaches is well deserved, and the whistle gives me licence to roam.

What captivates me about this venue is the refreshment on offer. There are five snack stalls inside the stand, offering mostly Korean street food favourites like fishcakes on sticks. There is, amazingly, a convenience store in the tunnel beneath the stand. This one sells mostly crisps and instant noodles, and – get this – offers a hot water facility to heat your noodles up. That’s something I’ve frequently seen at convenience stores across the city, but in a stadium? With a captive market? You’re not going to make the punters pay through the nose for their snacks? Whatever happened to “one born every minute”? 

Sadly there is no alcohol on sale, and you can’t bring your own either: a serious man in a dark suit with an earpiece is going around looking for contraband. I’m not sure if he confiscates, or just tidies up, but he comes back past me with an empty bottle of soju and another of wine. I’m off to the club shop anyway – there are two! Today’s special offer is 30% off the Marvel and Minions ranges. Seongnam FC may not be what it once was, having spent the previous two seasons in the second division, but this is not a faded club reduced to penury by council budget restraints. These guys know how to merch. So I stocked up. A shirt (which was always going to be too small: the salesperson told me as much), a cork coaster, a scarf, a sheet of slogan stickers… and I couldn’t resist a yellow Seongnam Minions mug. One born every minute.

Back in the stand with a bag of stash, my appetite for the football has waned a bit. Not that I was particularly following it earlier. Apart from the ultras at either end there’s not a lot of atmosphere and the standard on the pitch has not been great. On 70 minutes I sidle out. As I wait to cross the road outside I hear one set of cries, and then another (the lights take an age to change). I check my phone. Gyeongnam have scored a penalty and Seongnam are down to ten men. I’ve missed the dramatic denouement, the salvaging of hope for the visiting supporters. Right in front of my seat. But at least I catch the bus this time.

I’ve enjoyed a very civilised matchday experience and I’ll come again when next season gets going in March. But there are other teams to try out before I choose one to devote my life to. FC Seoul are the big team in the capital: they’re currently third and have won four league titles since the turn of the millennium, but they’re owned by a huge conglomerate (GS) and they play in a huge stadium which they never fill, although they do have the highest average attendance in the league this season (17,000). Suwon Bluewings have also known success relatively recently; they’re Samsung’s club and they too have good crowds but not good enough to fill their enormous World Cup legacy ground. Suwon, like Seongnam, is a separate city but quick and easy to reach from southern Seoul. Incheon United is too far to go regularly.

There are other Seoul satellite cities with teams in K League 2: Ansan Greeners (whose stadium is named after a cheering noise); Anyang (who have a motto in Esperanto); even more distant Asan (the police team) might be doable at a stretch. Seoul E-Land (whose first ever manager, in 2014, was a Falkirk-supporting former junior league player from Thurso) finished bottom of the second division this season, but since there is no relegation they will be back next time. Their big plus is that they play in the Olympic stadium, easily accessible from my place. Bucheon is not too far either: it’s a phoenix team formed after the local franchise was moved to the holiday island of Jeju, 400 kilometres away. And then there’s the lower leagues, which are being reorganised for next season.

I’ll keep you posted.