A short history of Korean professional football
Beginnings
The Korean professional football league has been in existence in one form or another since 1983, when the six founder members played for the "Super League" title.
The first champions were the colorfully titled "Hallelujah," so called due to the club's owner being a company with a strong Christian background.
By 1986, Hallelujah had dropped out of the league, and by the end of the same year, it took on the appearance of a bona fide professional competition, as Hanil Bank, the sole remaining company-based team, withdrew.
Over the next ten years, the number of teams gradually grew, and in 1997, a new chapter was opened in Korean professional football with the founding of the country's 10th professional club. The Taejon Citizen became the only member of the league not to be owned by a major company, Taejon City Hall being the majority shareholder.
Over the years, the competition has been known by a number of different names, but from 1998 onward, despite the official title depending on the main sponsor, it has been commonly referred to as the "K-League."
Leading Lights
Since the league's inauguration, the most titles have been won by Daewoo, with four, the last of these coming in 1997 with the team known as the Pusan Daewoo Royals.
The end of the 1999 season saw the passing of an era, as, with the parent company floundering in a sea of debt, the decision was made to sell off the club. After an initial approach by a banking company, Hyundai Industrial Development and Construction bought the team and renamed it the Pusan I.cons.
The acquisition of a third of the league's 10 teams by the giant conglomerate was met with some disapproval, with the words "conflict of interest" being mentioned by many, but there is no doubt that the southern port city deserved to have continued representation, with the largest crowds attending Korean club football matches regularly flocking in their tens of thousands to Kudok Stadium.
In 1985, Daewoo had opened a new chapter for the league, becoming the first Korean club to reach the pinnacle of Asian club football by winning the Asian Club Championship, and by the late 1990s, the competition had come to be dominated by the K-League's finest.
The domestic league's team of the 90s, the Ilhwa Chunma, brought the ACC trophy back to Korea in 1996, having completed a hat-trick of league titles the previous year. A year later, the Chunma were dethroned as Asianchampions by the Pohang Steelers, who went on to retain the trophy in 1998, becoming only the second team to do so.
Problems and Solutions
In the last couple of years, however, Korean football has watched the trophy slip from its grasp. With the money the neighbouring J. League has poured into youth development and big-name foreign coaches and playersstarting to reap results, rumblings of discontent are starting to be heard, to the effect that Korea has begun to relinquish its top-dog status to its arch-rival.
The complacency that arose from years of supremacy has been cast off, and the league is being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Alarm at Japan's impressive performance in the 1999 World Youth Championship led directly to moves to set up a more organised youth development system, and there are signs that more young players are eager to skip the usual route through university and go straight into the professionals.
The 2000 season saw the start of a nine-team reserve league - Taejon being the only K-League side not represented - split into two regional groups to keep the expenses incurred by clubs down.
The Ilhwa Chunma, having moved their home base to Songnam, just south of Seoul, at the start of the 2000 season, became the first team to lay all-weather grass. Salaries and transfer fees have also been on the rise, although still a fraction of the kind of figures that have led a number of Korea's top stars to ply their trade in Japan, and some of the league's leading players have begun to receive the kind of media attention usually afforded to pop stars and actors.
The Present
This season's K-League championship sees another change in format. Gone are the playoffs involving the top four teams, which in the last two seasons left the fourth-placed team one win away from taking the league title.
Gone too are golden goal extra-time and penalty shootouts, with the authorities bringing Korea into line with the world's most respected leagues, by decreeing that draws will be allowed.
As well as the league, the teams participate in three other tournaments. There is a pre-season cup competition, with the teams separated into two pools, the top two in each going on to the knockout stages. Midway through the season, there is a knockout tournament played in the space of just over a week. The season usually ends with the FA Cup, the players' reward for the gruelling 10-day tournament being that the semifinals and final take place on the beautiful southern resort island of Cheju-do, but the format will probably be changed this season. The winning team secures Korea's place in the Asian Cup Winners' Cup.
