What's more popular in Korea? Baseball or Soccer?

In terms of watching on TV, baseball is much more popular than soccer.

Many people watch the baseball matches in the national league, and many people do care about the results. 7엠스코어

However, not many people watch the soccer matches in the national league, and I haven’t met anyone who really cares about the results. Actually, Pim Verbeek, the former Dutch coach for the South Korean national soccer team, mentioned that nobody cared about the national league, while everybody cared about the soccer matches between South Korea and foreign countries, and wanted the South Korean national team to play like the Brazilian national team.

However, for playing, I think soccer is much more popular than baseball.

Baseball (Korean Baseball Organization, KBO)

Baseball is not a kind of game that is played all over the world. There are less than 20 countries in the world with professional baseball leagues, biggest of it all being USA and Canada. Then countries like Japan and Korea would follow it. In Korea, baseball was started in 1982 with two different divisions, Korean Baseball Championship and Futures League. The most famous teams would be LG Twins, Lotte Giants, Samsung Lions and Kia Tigers. All-time famous players are Chan Ho Park, our very first MLB player, followed by Seung Yeop Lee, Shin Soo Choo and Dae Ho Lee.

Football (Korean League, K-League)

Finally, one of the most loved games around the world, football (soccer) is very famous in Korea too. In Korea, it was started in 1986 with 5 different teams under the name of Korean Super League. In 1998, it was reformed with the current name of K-League and has expanded to 16 teams in total. And it was divided into two different leagues, Challenge and Classic working in a division system. The most popular teams would be FC Seoul, Pohang Steelers and JeonBuk Hyundai Motors. Similar to other sports teams in Korea, corporations such as Samsung and Hyundai own some of these teams and they name the teams after the company. The top players of all time are Ji Sung Park , Yeong Pyo Lee, Sung Yeung Ki, and of course, Beum Keun Cha the legend.

The order of popularity of these sports games would be: Baseball, Football, then followed by Basketball. The Korean baseball league is the most popular overall throughout the season, whereas football gets really hyped up when it comes to the national team games including World Cup.

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