Football, baseball, esports, and the roar
On 12 October, after the last regular-season game at 잠실야구장, four Doosan legends stood at the bases in the dark and lifted home plate. LG had said its own goodbye five days earlier. The 44-year-old stadium is due to come down for a domed replacement — but the postseason, starting tonight with LG against Doosan, will keep it open for at least two more games.
엄지성's 61st-minute goal at Toyota Stadium made Korea the first side to win the men's tournament four times running, and exempted 20 of its 23 players from active military service. Within a day three of them were apologising for saying what the medal was for — and the argument about the exemption itself had started again.
The hosts of Aichi–Nagoya 2026 played North Korea's anthem for South Korea's hockey team, introduced Korea as the Republic of China at a medal ceremony, put Hideyoshi on the welcome stage, lost the basketball team's bus before the final, and housed athletes in leaking containers. Then a ballpark sign listed the Rising Sun flag among banned items, and the organising committee said sorry — in Japanese only, to its own crowd — because the flag was 'naturally' allowed. Its own rulebook bans flags that suggest political claims. It chose not to read it.
Two days before the final, Korea's all-professional squad was shut out by a Japanese side of corporate-league employees, its first Asian Games loss to Japan in twenty years. Then it rained on Toyohashi with no reserve day, Gwak Bin threw 111 pitches through it, and Kim Do-young — a week after breaking his nose, hitting .250 for the tournament — chopped an infield single off the third baseman's glove in the eighth. Sixteen players walked off the field with their military service converted into 34 months of baseball. Korean coverage calls that an exemption. It isn't, and a former defence-committee lawmaker spent Monday arguing it shouldn't exist at all.
He hit his fortieth home run on 8 September — one day after the window to become the youngest ever had closed. The next night his own bunt attempt broke his nose. He had surgery that night, came back four days later wearing a face guard, and drove in his hundredth run to become the youngest player in Korean baseball history to a 40–100–100 season, beating a 1999 mark by nine days. Then he reported to the national team. The league he leaves in fourth place does not stop while he is gone.
He hit his 39th on 26 August with Yankees and Rangers scouts in the stand, needing one more before he turned older than Lee Seung-yeop was in 1999. Then somebody checked the record-holder's birthday and found a lunar date, a week of games was cancelled for heat, four more were rained off, and the deadline arrived anyway. On the last day he could still have beaten it, Kim went four-for-four — four singles, nothing over the fence — and afterwards said the thing nobody expected him to say out loud.
Seven thousand four hundred amateurs paid their own airfare to Daegu this month to enter a world championship anyone over 35 can join. Among them: a Thai schoolteacher who took up sport at 80 and is now 106, a Korean who vaulted at three Olympics and won gold on the same runway thirty years later, and a 90-year-old who finished last of six in the 100 metres while his granddaughter watched. The 106-year-old withdrew from his first event. On 27 August he threw a discus 7.59 metres, nine centimetres past the world record for his age group, in 33-degree heat.
In 2018 UNESCO did something it had never done: it took two separate national applications — one from Pyongyang, one from Seoul — and welded them into a single listing. Both would have passed on their own. The merge was chosen, not needed. And the two countries cannot actually wrestle each other: one fights on sand, the other on mats, and there has been no exchange between them since.
A KBO crowd sings non-stop for nine innings, with a different fifteen-second anthem for every batter. Then the composers noticed, sued — not over money — and all ten clubs switched off their walk-up music overnight. Nexen replaced twenty-six of its twenty-seven chants with public-domain art songs and fans said they sounded like funeral music. Busan didn't get its anthem back for five years.
In August 2001 Korea's top four male archers walked out of a training camp after a single day, and the federation barred them from the World Championships. The system chose itself over its champions and kept winning. What Korean archery actually is — including the part where it is overwhelmingly women, and the village school that produced Kim Woo-jin is down to 33 children.
How a boy drilled in the basics by his father in Chuncheon became Korea's greatest export in cleats — a Premier League Golden Boot, a military exemption won on a football pitch, a trophy at last, and now a record-breaking new life in Los Angeles.
He is a six-time world champion who once got out of the army by winning a video game. As the Esports World Cup lands in Paris this month — its first-ever edition outside Riyadh — here's why Lee 'Faker' Sang-hyeok is the greatest of all time, and how Korea turned League of Legends into genuine soft power.
Most countries treat a group-stage exit as a bad week. Korea treated it as a scandal of state. Within days of crashing out of the 2026 World Cup, the coach had resigned, the captain had issued a wrenching apology, the federation chief was gone, police were investigating, and the president himself had demanded a probe. Here's why a football result became a national reckoning — and what it says about how Koreans read fairness.
Twenty-four years ago he was the captain who took Korea to the World Cup semifinals — the first Asian ever to win an individual award at the tournament. This summer, after the worst World Cup placing in his country's history, he resigned as its coach while the President of Korea called him 'incapable' and ordered an investigation into how he ever got the job. The rise and ruin of Hong Myung-bo, explained.
Every four years, the most buttoned-up country you know turns its streets into a roaring sea of red. Here's the story of the Red Devils, the 2002 miracle that started it all, the chant you'll never get out of your head — and how to join in while the 2026 World Cup is on.
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