Discussing Problems of the K-League

[svo7]

There are countless problems that stunt the rapid growth of the Korea League, quite comparable to Korea's closest neighboors, Japan.

Please discuss these problems and we'll figure out how to fix them.

I'll cut the tape.

1. Lack of effort to market and advertise.

I personally don't know all the names of the teams and their local towns in the Korea Basketball League. From the eyes of a Korean basketball fan, I could seem ignorant, obnoxious and rude. However, just because I can't name the teams' names, does not make me a non-basketball fan. I am interested in basketball, and I do realize that Seoul has a Samsung Thunders basketball team. So what do I do? Try to find their homepage and find when their next home game is.

This is our first problem.

I've travelled to many cities throughout the peninsula but never once have I seen an advertisement of its local club. There are thousands of buses in Seoul and all these buses advertise new releases of movies. There are millions of posters in subway carts that advertise men's essense moisture face masks, but not once did I see an advertisement of FC Seoul.

The K-League Association apart from the KFA probably have not even conducted a market research.

How many people are willing to go watch the K-League?
Do you know the teams of the K-League?
Did you know that there is a team in your town?
Are you a soccer fan? Baseball?

This League obviously does not even know where to start their campaign. People are blaming the broadcasting companies for their lack of effort to broadcast games, but in all honesty, who kind of nutbag company will broadcast games when they cant even estimate the number of people who are willing to watch the games during prime time?

[Holyjoe]

To be fair, I think I remember seeing one or two FC Seoul advertisments on a subway train on line 6... I remember that mostly because I pointed out to a friend that all the photos had been photoshopped to insert FC Seoul badges over the Anyang ones on player pictures.
But aye, be a bit adventurous and stick advertisments in line 1 or 2 trains... you're kind of preaching to the converted by having adverts in trains that are going towards the stadium anyway.

The little megaphone trucks with dancy girls on the back that speed through city centres are pretty funny, though I wonder how many people are spurred onto going to a game after seeing one of those.

Something that I thought clubs like Suwon could do is make use of their corporation facilities to persuade folk to go to games. For example, find a downtown Samsung shop to sell tickets (stick dancy girls out front with big signs etc... you can never have enough dancy girls ), and use Samsung company buses to shuttle folk from there to the stadium.

[SteveW]

Marketing football is a bit of a strange one.... I've never seen an advert for football in Korea really (there is the odd one as HJ says and they also have the big banners etc close to grounds) but then I've never seen football advertised in the UK, US or Europe either.

Most of the promotion football gets is via the media
in these countries who give pretty much blanket coverage.

Its kind of a chicken and egg thing because whats needed to improve the presence of the K-League is more media exposure but they won't get that until the K-League is more popular and people actually care about it. There just isn't a football culture in Korea. For example do the main news shows preview the fixtures and let people know what games are on??

As far as promotion goes it would seriously help if they stopped moving the games around so much. Pick a time (7pm Saturday) and stick to it. Its difficult for 'floating voters'to just turn up if they are never sure if a game is on.

Oh and as HJ says.....more dancing girls Everywhere. All the time!

[nyujeelandsaram]

Back home in NZ radio plays a very big part as well.

We have a nationwide sports only radio station and other stations also are often predominantly sports orientated in the weekends as well.

To my knowledge (after asking the missus several times) Korea does not have anything like that. As far as I am aware no sport is covered on radio live at all.

I suppose it's because people listen to music or watch it on the tellie if it's on or more likely just don't give a stuff about sport. And can't be bothered ringing up the station and giving their two cents worth. You'd at least think that baseball games might be on the radio on week nights for folks stuck in traffic for 2 hours getting home from work.

I know back home that when you have a big league, rugby, or whatever game on friday, saturday or sunday night then it can really get hyped up through the radio all day and it's where people find out the latest news (injuries, kick off time, expected crowd, weather etc).

But aside from the radio the rest of the 'marketing' is through the newspapers and tv as Steve mentioned. There are billboards here and there (generally not too far from the grounds) but there is also things like meet the player events, they go to shopping malls, visit sick kids etc and then go to the dancing girl clubs straight from the hospital for the anti-PR work that sees them in the papers the next day after being found lying in a gutter with their pants on their head.

;D

[SteveW]

On the other hand......people seemed pretty able to find out about the Olympic game being shown at the stadium etc and turned up in big numbers.

Pretty sad state of affairs when more people turn up at 3am in Suwon stadium to watch the big screen than do to see the game in the afternoon.

How were these things publicised? Anyone know?

Maybe the secret if for every team to be called Korea, play in red strips and be allocated 1 squad member from the 2002 WC heroes in order to encourage your average Mr Kim to go along?

People just don't seem to do live sport here. The baseball stadiums are equally empty most of the time. There needs to be some kind of occasion to get people out in numbers.

[svo7]

SteveW said:

Marketing football is a bit of a strange one.... I've never seen an advert for football in Korea really (there is the odd one as HJ says and they also have the big banners etc close to grounds) but then I've never seen football advertised in the UK, US or Europe either.

Most of the promotion football gets is via the media
in these countries who give pretty much blanket coverage.

Its kind of a chicken and egg thing because whats needed to improve the presence of the K-League is more media exposure but they won't get that until the K-League is more popular and people actually care about it. There just isn't a football culture in Korea. For example do the main news shows preview the fixtures and let people know what games are on??

As far as promotion goes it would seriously help if they stopped moving the games around so much. Pick a time (7pm Saturday) and stick to it. Its difficult for 'floating voters'to just turn up if they are never sure if a game is on.

Oh and as HJ says.....more dancing girls Everywhere. All the time!

Drawing a direct comparison between Europe and Korea is a bit of nonsense. The TV stations won't cover a league that draws about 7000~10,000 on average. Of course, Im not saying that the TV stations arent to blame but under Korea's circumstances, it's a bit frustrating to see that the clubs are basically doing nothing at all to draw bigger crowds. Korea has no soccer culture - if Korea doesn't, why not try to make one? There should be some investment for bigger results. Without any changes, what is there to expect from the K-League within the coming years?

[SteveW]

TV stations are happy to give blanket coverage to baseball though and nobody goes to watch that either from what I've seen.

I agree that Korea and Europe are very different and I'm looking at it as an outsider but i really wonder whether TV advertising would encourage people to go to games.

I think Aberdeen ran some TV ads back in Scotland a few years ago now that I think about it. Don't know if it had any effect on attendances - they stopped it pretty quickly anyway.

One problem the K-League does have is that many of the games simply don't offer that much entertainment value. So even if you do encourage someone to go along once or twice there is little to keep them coming back.

There is a general lack of awareness about football though and maybe some marketing could help that. How many people don't even know that Korea has a football league?

[nyujeelandsaram]

svo7 said:

Drawing a direct comparison between Europe and Korea is a bit of nonsense. The TV stations won't cover a league that draws about 7000~10,000 on average. Of course, Im not saying that the TV stations arent to blame but under Korea's circumstances, it's a bit frustrating to see that the clubs are basically doing nothing at all to draw bigger crowds. Korea has no soccer culture - if Korea doesn't, why not try to make one? There should be some investment for bigger results. Without any changes, what is there to expect from the K-League within the coming years?

As SteveW said, they cover basically ALL baseball games here and the K-League averages double what the KBO gets along to each game. And they average about 5 times the average basketball crowd here which also has near blanket coverage.

It's a simple matter of footie not rating here. With baseball and basketball the camera lens is confined to a much smaller area where all the action takes place. This almost creates an atmosphere on it's own. Which is something the football struggles to create on a large pitch in a WC stadium with 5,000 people spread over 50,000 seats.

Saying that they should "create" a soccer culture here is of course what people involved want but saying it is the easy part. There are hundreds of sports around the world that would like to achieve the same thing but can't or don't know how.

There's only been a domestic league for 20 or so years so the crowds aren't THAT awful.

Anyway, been down this road before and don't have the energy right at this moment to start all again.

[svo7]

Well, You can't really compare Baseball and Soccer as they are two entirely different sports. And not only that, broadcasting Baseball leads to more won or dollars just by selling sponsorship on the air. And we can't just rely on television. As I said before, just because it wasn't sucessful in Europe doesnt mean it won't be successful here.

If you all recall, the Red Devils had their "Dae Han Min Guk" and "Oh Pilseung Korea" chants since the 98 World Cup Qualifiers, but 80 percent of the Korean population learned the chants only months prior to the World Championships in 2002, thanks to SK Telecom who aired those chants on their TV Ads, despite when the Red Devils were actually formed back in 97, these boys were on television 24-7, whether it be the news or whatnot.

I always see dumb commercials for some wedding hall on tv. why can't there be an ad for Seoul United or FC Seoul on SBS?

[nyujeelandsaram]

How much do those ads cost?

I remember seeing ads for the K-League at the start of this season on the tellie.

Maybe they cost more than all the money made from a crowd of 5,000. Maybe they have realised nobody will ever come to domestic sport in Korea unless it's some sort of one off.

I mean despite the HUGE profile of baseball in Korea they still can't sell out their Korea Series final games half the time.

Soccer is unlikely to do any better regardless of what it does except scratch away for years and try and get kids to keep showing up year after year.

[Holyjoe]

I wouldn't want to cast aspersions on the loyalty of my fellow Grandbleu, but I wonder what several years in the K-league wilderness would do to the Suwon support, taking Bucheon and Busan as previous examples of well-supported clubs that have lost a huge chunk of fans through being crap.

Suwon fans have been accustomed to success almost from the word go, but if they were to become a middle of the pack side in the next year or so (not too unrealistic given how they're playing) then I wonder whether we'd see similar crowd shrinkages like at Busan/Bucheon?

[nyujeelandsaram]

To use a good example on NZ sport.

The Warriors (NZ's team in the australian rugby league competition) get about 15,000-20,000 when they are going really well to each game.

But this year they have had a shocking season and are a chance of getting the wooden spoon going into the last round where 15 teams are competing.

There crowds since they started sliding are in the region of 8,000.

The city has about 1.2 mill in the greater region but we are talking about an area just about the size of gyeonggido I suppose.

[Ed.]

nyujeelandsaram said:

the wooden sthingy

Ah, for crying out loud! Hang on a second - I'm going to go and take a look at the feckin censor.

[Holyjoe]

Is the promotion and relegation set-up from 2007 (if they actually do go ahead with it and don't change their minds time and again... ho hum) going to make any real difference to crowds as folk seem to think?

And are I'Park going to be interested in sponsoring Busan when they're playing in the K2 league in 2008?

;D

[SteveW]

Yeah it'll make a hell of a difference to the crowds of the relegated teams!! ;D