It won’t concern many, but today Busan IPark announced that midfielder (and likely World Cup squad member) Park Jong-Woo will leave the club for Chinese Super League side Guangzhou R&F. There, Park will join fellow Korean Jang Hyun-Soo at Sven-Goran Eriksson’s club.
Why are our players leaving to play in a Chinese league?
Probably money but is this a growing trend or am I just seeing things?
it’s a growing trend, and i think it’s been addressed here before somewhere in the past.
I think of the same thing. ALL the K-league players that are either in the national team or had good seasons in the K-league are going to the China league. At this rate the K-league won’t have any special talent to keep it going and would only have the talentless BS we saw at the US tour. China with its freaking money.
The best hope for the K League is that it becomes a league that really invests in youth, and the bigger clubs (Seoul, Suwon, Jeonbuk, etc) become these hotbeds of young Korean (and Asian) talent . . . who then get snapped up by Europe and China.
Problem is there isn’t any money to do that and that compounds as the league becomes less relevant.
Teaser alert, we recorded a podcast where we discussed the K League’s issues a bit. Roy has been busy editing it, but he’s busy as always, so I’m not sure when it’ll be out exactly. But, yes money is an issue, especially since many of the clubs are bankrolled by the big corporations who view the teams more as marketing tools rather than sports entities. Most of those businesses are scaling bank their investment in teams, and the rest of the clubs are owned by the local governments who don’t have the means to spend.
I shared this in the last comment thread, but just in case you didn’t see it, Roy. Check out the MLS article on HMB
http://www.mlssoccer.com/news/article/2014/01/30/what-ever-happened-south-korea-world-cup-hero-la-galaxy-defender-hong-myung-
Nice! I’m going to have to repost that sometime soon in a tavern kickaround