time to face facts I think. The Korean sports papers have 5 pages of baseball news everyday before the soccer section even starts. check out all the online sites http://www.sportschosun.com/ http://www.sportsseoul.com/ http://www.stoo.com/ http://www.hot.co.kr/ everyday it is baseball baseball baseball...oh and by the way some soccer game was played as well. I don't mind baseball but I think the baseball media has taken over the sports newspapers and tv networks in Korea and soccer needs to start spraying some money around. The 45 baseball journalists at each paper are not going to want soccer to get a foot in the door or they wil be losing their jobs. IT'S WAR "one sport countries" suc my crack.
Its funny how I talked to my momee about this. I turned her into a footie nut and she constantly complains how there is never any soccer on TV. So I was like " get cable, ma" And then she gave me the "STFU" look. Anyway, despite being 50, shes quite into sports. She knows everything about Baseball but now she hates to sport. According to her, Baseball has a reason for being number one in Korea. so heres my 2 pennies: Before the professional league was created, the world of Highschool Korean baseball was the hottest issue (I believe Japan still maintains this tradition). Dongdaemun stadium was always packed and teams like Gwangju-Il High School and others were the top racers between the Jeonla - Gyeongsan rivalry. Politics also has a role in this. When the Baseball league was found, the teams had the strongest local support. I was raised in Seoul and I have the strongest passion for the city. My mother is from Gyeongju "Kang" family and my father is from the Pyeongyang "Lee" family. But i honestly dont care where my parents were brought up from. However, the average korean kid living in seoul always seems to support their parents backround. Ok, to further explain this: Whenever there was a game in seoul that hosted a Jeonla team match, the HAITAI tigers, all the seoulites from Jeonla would go there. According to my ma, if you were at Jamsil stadium and didnt have a Jeonla accent, Jamsil stadium was one of the worst places to go on game day. she said "think of the hooligans in europe. flying soju bottles and flying ect,," So with the Jeonla - Gyeongsang rivalry so intense, and with people from Jeonla only supporting a jeonla nominee for president, the governemnt soon decided to kill the rivarly between the two provinces. THUS, we have this lack of localism today. The government seemed to have invested a lot of money in professional sports, especially in Baseball and entertainment to blindfold the eyes of hte citizens and carry on their shet "the gwangju incident". ok..i dont know how to end this but korea's baseball history is still a prominent factor in korean politics and such....so thats why baseball will always be korea's number 1 sport, even tho there are more ppl who like soccer than basebal..
Korea's regionalism has very deep roots, from the ancient times when the farmers of Joella had their rice taxed very heavily. With President Park Chung-Hee hailing from Kyongsang and favoring that region for decades, regionalism remains very strong, and gov't intervention with sports is not likely to (and has not) reduce that much. Funny, I seem to remember growing up in Korea in the late 70's that soccer was more popular than baseball. Most people saw baseball as an elitist sport associated with the Japanese and Americans, while soccer was considered more of a people's sport. On the other hand, many also thought baseball was "cool" and associated it with the upwardly mobile.
Regionalism, or Localism is generally a good thing but it's not the case in Korea. Discrimination from and toward Jeolla and Gyungsang is getting so out of hand to the point that your parents don't want you to marry, your friends hate you for, and ppl from each province hate the others more than they hate Japanese. My mom's from Gyungsang and my dad's from Jeolla. It's really obnoxious how my relatives bad mouth each other. And Korea is already a small country. Old saying is right: Koreans can't unite and don't want a leader.
this is all very interesting. In New Zealand we have some big sporting rivalries, and these rivalries extend to general rivalries. But I would never call it hateful. However in NZ, Rugby Union is the sport of the middle-upper class while Rugby League (my sport) is considered the sport of the working class. So Rugby Union totally dominates the newspapers, radio, tv etc. Korean soccer needs a tv channel dedicated to soccer that plays all the K-League games. Not until then will people know for sure which sport is bigger when you finally get baseball and soccer matches going head to head on the tellie.
In 2016, the Doosan Bears drew the highest average home attendance (16,180), followed by the LG Twins (16,078), SK Wyverns (12,016), Lotte Giants (11,842), Samsung Lions (11,825), Nexen Heroes (10,862) and the KIA Tigers (10,743).
i think most people here know that baseball is the more popular sport now than soccer. If there are anyone here who are in denial, they are being naive. I don't understand why some BSK idiots here think it's wrong to watch Korean baseball or prefer it. Not that I prefer it, but I enjoy both KBO and K-League equally. Get over it.
The foundation of a fanbase has to be the community in the area. They should have done more to promote "nationalism" in the communities to create interest/rivalries like they did baseball. It's too late now. The globalized generation move too fast now, these type of things had to develop when there was less to do and could be passed down to further generations. For example, in England whole communities gathered to support their players every week. Most were just regular old joe's from the community itself, half the time drunk off their minds before the games. You had pictures of these guys being carried after games as heroes even though they made like 10 pounds if that. This created the culture/tradition that carried forward to today.