So I don't know if this was ever posted here, but this blog was written last November. I didn't even know Benitez had any relationship with Chunnam last season. What do you guys think about his assessment? Obviously Rafa is a guy who knows his football (despite being a bit of a scapegoat at Liverpool). http://www.rafabenitez.com/web/index.php?act=mostrarBlog&id_entrada=44&idioma=in Edit: Apparently it's not Rafa Benitez, just posted on Rafa Benitez's blog. This is Gerrard Nus' assessment. Still interesting nonetheless.
its pretty interesting and accurate which is nice. i think he described the level of play well and i agree with him on Chunnam. they are a really young side so i like to watch them play. they do struggle for goals though.
I can definitely see Rafa writing this with a feather plume fountain pen: After it split from its ‘sister’ North Korea in 1945, without a peace treaty being signed and in view of the radical change of government there, it became a democratic country (1987) and is today one of the most politically free and socially aware Asian countries. And to say this about a country in this part of the world is not to be taken lightly.
2 things that stuck out to me: 1) He said the K-League season schedule should align with European leagues. If this was to happen, would it really improve the league? Majority of the Korean clubs have hard time with attendances. The cold weather would not help any club with their attendance. These clubs will have hard time attracting non-soccer fans and perhaps even your general soccer fans. It's possible you'll only see the true hardcore fans in the winter months matches. Korea can be brutal with their snowstorms. On the flip side, people might be more in the mood for soccer since European season is going on and might be more incline to attend local matches. 2) K-League needing foreign coaches and different soccer ideologies/methodologies. I know we had foreign managers and coaches before but most of the current managers are not surprisingly Korean. I'm not going to say these men are not smart. But you have to question their general level of international/non-domestic football experience. I certainly think bringing in managers with different ideologies would help Korean soccer. Only issue is that who'll come here?
the weather would be a huge factor. but on the plus side we wouldnt have to compete all season with baseball. i think we wont change though cause most of our neighbor leagues are at that time. the foreigner rule will not change soon despite qatars antics.
On the other hand, I hate going to matches when jangma gets going. Hard to plan out days when you never know if a baseball game is going to get canceled or a k-league game is a slopfest. When I'm in Korea and the weather is good, I usually attend 1 or 2 matches each weekend in the Gyeongido area. I recall a cracker I missed last season at Sangam where Molina scored in the last seconds and I didn't attend because it was pouring.
Interesting read. Some interesting points. I agree K-league must become more free about foreigners. That would help teams to grow and challenging the market , anyway at the end of the day money is the key whether you get foreign coaches or players it's all about money. Unfortunately Football is second behind baseball which is understandable and I doubt this may change for the future... But I don't think J-league is better than K-league honestly, look at last years AFC results, korean clubs are more decent than japaneses despite poor investments. I also liked the idea of making european system over americans, with promotion and relegation which is the key to the progress. And i think the most important thing for the avenir of Korean football is to establish european styles of academy,with european coaches even if it means you have to pay extra money...Maybe not all the teams but the 4 or 5 biggest clubs should have Top Academy like Spanish leagues, establish real top facilities and programs. And I think korean young players should also study and mostly just enjoy football like in france or Spain, not doing only military trainings like stupid robots or something... Football it's not all about being physical and hard-working (which are good qualities ) but not just that... I mean we did the same with cars so why not to import european football culture ? Just my personnal elementary thoughts I'm not KFA worker nor chairman so don't know how they're working.
I agree that allowing 1 or 2 more foreigners is an okay idea, in fact a good idea. But i would never say ok to having no limit on amount of foreigners. After all, you still do need Korean players to play because that's the only way to develop not only individually but as a league and an NT. But allowing couple more foreigners for each club would raise the level of the play slightly (unless K-League goes after complete scrubs). And with the rise of the promotion/relegation system with the N-League coming into play, this is a good idea. J-League has better foreign players and much better infrastructure. I think your average Korean K-League player is slightly better than your average Japanese J-League player though, hence why Koreans do better than the Japanese in AFC competition. I agree with the Europeanization of the K-League, except for European schedule. K-League needs to get better technically. The pace, and the physicality are there though. But your average K-League match will have share of sloppy plays because the technical level isn't too great.
Yeah right. I don't know much about k-league from where I am, so can you explain me why the european calendar is not right ? (the wheather ?) And which european league can you compare K-league with ? I mean overall level (not the style of play of course) but if a Korean team meets an european one regurlarly... eredivise ?
The whole August-May season schedule won't work in the K-League because the weather alone is a huge reason.
I've posted this in a couple other forums (MLS General and A-League) so I figured why not here also. Although I mostly watch the US League, I've gotten progressively more interested in the Asian Leagues over the last few years; first by watching the A-League, then the AFC Champions League, the J-League, and finally (once someone here directed me to the Afreeca replay site) the K-League as well. Since MLS judges itself in no small part against the Mexican Primera, I'm assuming the K-League also compares itself to other regional leagues when assessing level of play. On that note ... Here is a quick analysis of the current National Team pool players in the K/J/A-Leagues and MLS. It's only one of many metrics you can use to judge the quality of these seemingly similar leagues (and totally aside from the pure enjoyment you may derive from actually watching the games) and its usefulness is certainly open to debate. At any rate, I thought it was interesting. Data was pulled from the respective Wikipedia NT pages. As background, from the May 5, 2012 ELO Rankings (www.eloratings.net): 16. (21). Australia (1810) 21. (31). South Korea (1768) 25. (30). Japan (1757) 29. (29). United States (1727) As expected, a fairly tight grouping as far as overall NT performance. Any one of them could beat any of the others on any given day. From the 2010 World Cup Squads wiki, each league contributed the following number of players from the following countries: J-League (25) : Japan (19), S. Korea (2), N. Korea (2), Australia (2) K-League (13) : S. Korea (13) A-League (10) : Australia (2), New Zealand (8) MLS (6) : USA (4), New Zealand (1), Honduras (1) Even from this brief overview you can see some trends start to emerge. Interestingly, some distinct differences also show up when breaking down the current NT player pools in each league. The K and J Leagues obviously have higher percentage of domestic based players in their NT pools, but their cumulative experience (total caps) is roughly in-line with their percentage distribution between foreign and domestic leagues. One reason these leagues are so strong is that they retain a lot of good local talent. This is in sharp contrast to MLS and the HAL where the vast majority of the current NT experience (as measured by total caps by these players) is based overseas. Maybe that's common knowledge, but it came to me as somewhat of a mild surprise. Perhaps less so for the HAL. Distribution of NT Pool Players (Domestic Based v. Foreign Based): Continuing with the theme, here are a few more metrics based on the same data, ranked accordingly. Analysis of current NT Pool Players in each country's Domestic League: Although not show in detail here, what I found particularly interesting from the last stat is that if you look at the 3 teams in each league with the most NT pool players they accounted for: 33% of domestic based Japanese national team pool players (Antlers - 5, Urawa - 5, Nagoya - 3) 42% of domestic based American national team pool players (LAG - 4, SKC - 3, FCD - 3) 58% of domestic based Australian national team pool players (MV - 3, and 3 others at 2) 59% of domestic based Korean national team pool players (Jeonbuk - 6, Ulsan - 5, Sanju - 5) The J-League also had 3 more teams with 3 players, and 7 teams with 2 players. MLS wasn't far behind as far as spreading the talent around with multiple teams having 2 players, and several more with 1 each. The K-League seems to concentrate more of their NT talent in the top domestic clubs. While you can draw your own conclusions (or dismiss the results altogether), what is also worth considering is the contribution of foreign players in each league to quality of play. I haven't completed my analysis on this part yet, but by my estimate, MLS has over 100 foreign players with NT experience (i.e 1 or more cap). Of course, this has to be balanced by the large variety of CONCACAF minnows that MLS can draw from with respect to foreign players with NT experience. At the same time, just one good player from some of those teams can contribute greatly. Given the limited amount of foreign slots in the J/K-League (4?) and A-League (4/5?) I haven't seen a similar trend in these leagues. Perhaps because K and J-League teams tend to focus on talent from Brazil whose NT players are obviously playing elsewhere. However, MLS does seem to gain a disproportionate amount of benefit from having such liberal foreign player (and work visa/green card) allowances. The effects on the development of NT players is difficult to tell. Errata: Some players counted as NT in this analysis are listed with zero caps on Wiki. I assume they made the game day roster but never saw the field. In retrospect, perhaps I should have left them out. Meh.
In looking over the last 4 years of AFC results, K-League teams compiled the following record (W-D-L) versus J-Leauge teams. There are still 2 more head-to-head matches to go in this year's edition: 2012 2 - 3 - 1 2011 2 - 3 - 3 ( 2 - 0 in knock-out stage) 2010 2 - 1 - 5 ( 2 - 0 in knock-out stage) 2009 3 - 1 - 4 Overall, that's a 9 - 8 - 13 record in the group stage and a dominating 4 - 0 record in knock-out stage matches.
interesting compilation of data you got there You should narrow down your research or go in more depth. Figure out a way to drop fringe players. Maybe compile data with the final FIFA 2010 squad or Olympic squads. Try the different age groups like U-21 team and U-23 team and Senior Squad. (differentiate between the domestic league level 1 or 2 or the collegiate league.) In addition, be aware of cultural/business barrier within the different FA's. This can skew your data up. Americans rarely consider playing in an Asian league. Australians on the other hand are a bit more open minded. You should figure out a way to account for this bias. Maybe separating AFC based players from European based players. In general, English speaking players are more inclined to moving abroad then other players. Consider Manager selection bias. Every FA goes through different periods of team selection. (re-building the team or looking for new talented or veterans or domestic players etc...) We recently hired a new manager who selected a lot of experienced K-league players. Our recent call ups does not accurately display the real KNT. This is why i suggest you using Olympic or fifa squads as a starting point. Remember correlation does not imply causation. Good luck
Interesting... But I think one thing that isn't really accounted for is less Foreign vs Domestic and instead quality of league that they play in. I am no USMNT expert but as I recall, many of the players do not play much for their club or instead play in secondary or tertiary leagues. On the flipside, Korean and Japanese NT players tend not to go to Europe unless its to one of the top leagues, and have had a decent amount of success if they do, or on the flipside, return quickly to domestic leagues if things go poorly. EDIT: Thus to do a better analysis, one might need to weight the foreigners by minutes played vs league quality multiplier or something.
Thanks for the feedback. Definitely some good suggestions. I kept fringe players (i.e low number of caps) in the summary because even this indicates that they are "almost" NT quality and I thought that added some good context when assessing league strength. However, I will break this out in a future post because I think both perspectives would be useful; i.e. a broad view of the talent pool and a focused view on where the top players are located. I did start to do some analysis on the U-23 teams, but it seems hard to find available (or accurate) data. Once the Olympic rosters are finalized I may revisit this. I also plan to do an analysis of the Asian Cup and CONCACAF Gold Cup. I'm not too savvy on the culture/business barriers, so any info you can point me towards would be appreciated. I did a quick analysis of the current foreign players for K-Lg and J-Lg and the results were: Foreign Players by Continent (K-Lg and J-Lg) ____________________ % of____% that are Region __________No.___Total___Brazilian ----------------------------------------------------------- South America _____65____52%___ 94% Asia_____________45____36% Europe___________13____10% Africa____________1_____1% ________________124 Foreign Players by Continent (K-League) ____________________ % of____% that are Region __________No.___Total___Brazilian ----------------------------------------------------------- South America _____30____57%___ 90% Asia_____________12____23% Europe___________10____19% Africa____________1_____2% ________________53 Foreign Players by Continent (J-League) ____________________ % of____% that are Region __________No.___Total___Brazilian ----------------------------------------------------------- South America _____35____49%___ 97% Asia_____________33____46% Europe___________3_____4% Africa____________0_____0% ________________71 Overall, a seemingly clear preference for Brazilian (or other AFC nation's) players. So assuming there were American players who wanted to play in these leagues, it doesn't seem like any J/K-Lg team necessarily seek them out or seriously consider them. Looks like they have a firm strategy in place as to where they want to get players from. With Australia, don't they get a free foreign player spot on the club rosters in the other AFC leagues? Anyway, I think domestic Australian players generally see the K/J-Leagues as a step up in competition, whereas K/J and MLS players see moving between the leagues as more of a sideways move since the leagues are all similar in quality. K-League Foreign Players by Nation Brazil 27 Australia 8 Japan 3 Montenegro 3 Colombia 2 Serbia 2 Belgium 1 Bosnia 1 Croatia 1 China 1 Chile 1 Ghana 1 Romania 1 Macedonia 1 J-League Foreign Players by Nation Brazil 34 S Korea 23 N Korea 5 Australia 4 Colombia 1 Serbia 1 Netherlands 1 Croatia 1 Iran 1 I'm planning to do a team by team analysis of the players in each league (number of caps, number of games played in top tier leagues, or for really big clubs in smaller leagues like Ajax, Celtic/Rangers), so point taken. I did include a summary of the 2010 WC squads by league. Yup. I see your point. I tried to relate this initial analysis more directly to the quality of each national team (i.e. FIFA rankings). That is to say, "if the player is good enough to play regularly, or be in consideration, for the country's national team ... and the national team is ranked at a certain level ... you can make a very broad assumption as to the general quality of those players ... and thus the league where they play." This is why I also included the number of caps, since that also indicates, more than just the number of players, how much they contribute to the overall rank of the nation team. I'm also working on a formula to rank the leagues ... but that's turning out to be a lot of work.