The Tavern of the Taeguk Warriors is the brainchild of Roy Ghim, the “Old Tavern Owner”, who founded this site back in 2012. I (Jinseok) was the first guest author on the site.
Jae explains the history of the Tavern in his post here. Essentially, Roy founded the Tavern; Jae and I joined a few months later, then soon after that Tim also joined us. The four of us would go on to not only write the articles archived here but also record audio podcasts, video podcasts over Skype, and even YouTube videos with live commentary over K League highlights.
The Tavern grew and gained more authors and supporters, but eventually we became busy with our personal lives. Leadership of the Tavern switched hands between the original cast, but all four of us bowed out around 2018-2019 due to work and personal reasons. In the meantime, Roy continued to fund the Tavern’s hosting and website fees on his own. The new crew decided to start a new website, Fighting Stripes, in 2020, which is why you’ll see no posts between 2020-2022. The old Tavern of the Taeguk Warriors Twitter account had its handle changed to Fighting Stripes as well.
I chose to revive the Tavern in late 2022, after the World Cup, mostly because I did not want to see decades worth of work go to waste. Without continued funding the Tavern would have been deleted for good. We looked into ways to archive all the posts in the site but couldn’t find a way to do it. The Tavern to me is a beautiful archive of all that has been going on in Korean football since 2012, so I felt compelled to step in and keep this passion project of ours going. When I joined the crew in early 2013 I was still in high school. Now a doctor (MD) in Southern California, I plan on keeping the Tavern up and running indefinitely.
As Jae discusses in his Tavern reboot post, the primary authors will be myself and Jae, though Roy, Tim, and any of the prior Tavern authors may drop in to share their thoughts from time to time. With the risk of going dark for good eliminated (the next 6 years have already been secured with many more to come), we will continue our mission of discussing and analyzing Korean football.