The Proving Ground
Since the K League restarted, the teams drawing the most eyes have, of course, been those in K League 1.
The Seoul Devils, currently reigning as the undisputed powerhouse of the top flight, with Pohang Nautilus and Jeonbuk Hyeonjin Wheels chasing hard on their heels.
That attention is only natural — they are K League 1, the first division. The spotlight has always belonged to them.
But among people who actually care about Korean soccer, curiosity has begun to drift away from K League 1 and toward K League 2 — more precisely, toward Seongjin Hanul FC, the club Hanul started sponsoring.
Honestly, it would be stranger not to notice. The conditions practically demanded it.
A soccer team that Korea’s biggest conglomerate had just put its hands on.
An Austrian-born German manager, formerly a coach in the 2. Bundesliga, appointed out of nowhere.
An extreme youth-first rebuild that bordered on radical.
Every step of the process had been covered in the press, and Korean soccer fans had been quietly watching Seongjin Hanul FC ever since.
And after the World Cup exit — and the disgrace that came with it — distrust of domestic managers and a corresponding faith in foreign ones had only poured more fuel on that interest.
So how were we doing, then?
“Seongjin Hanul FC takes it again! Another win!”
“That’s four straight since the league restarted! Four in a row! They’re on an absolute tear — Seongjin Hanul FC!”
Four straight wins.
A side that had been mired in the mud of mid-table, clawing around the middle to upper-middle of the standings, had suddenly surged upward.
And they had done it without giving a single minute to Jo Tae-ung, the former ace who had been among the standouts of K League 2.
As expected, it had even started to make a little noise in the communities.
For the record, I did not leave a single comment under any of those posts. No matter how you look at it, I am not the type to manipulate public opinion.
And if you ask whether there were more threads than these — yes, there were. Though those ones carried a distinct contrarian flavor, people cheering for us simply because we had hired a foreign manager after the domestic coaches had made such a spectacle of themselves at the World Cup.
In any case, a new proving ground had arrived for us.
The K League Cup. The FA Cup equivalent of the K League. A tournament that, in a sense, was the whole league’s festival — nearly every club from K League 1 down through K League 4 taking part.
And why was this our test?
Because after we had casually crushed a third-division side in the second round, our next opponent was a K League 1 club.
The silver lining, if you could call it that, was that last season’s absolute top sides only entered from the round of sixteen, so we had been spared the truly brutal draw.
The one small problem was that our next opponent happened to be a team that had suddenly gotten very good this season.
Anyang Purples.
Until two years ago, Anyang Purples had been a K League 2 side. What set them apart was that even then, their squad quality had been rated as barely inferior to most K League 1 clubs.
The moment they installed a new manager and a new system, they took off — and now they were fighting for a place in the Asian Champions League from inside K League 1. In a way, they were a team that had already walked the road we intended to walk.
Word had also come that they had recently signed an Italian center back who could play multiple roles, and I could not help thinking they were going to be far more difficult than I wanted to admit.
I was in the middle of a long sigh when a voice came from beside me.
“Chairman, is something the matter?”
Yu-gyeong, asking in that perfectly flat, emotionless tone of hers.
Honestly, she could be so annoying. If she already knew, she could at least have the decency to leave me alone.
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“You don’t look well. Are you thinking about soccer?”
That hit a little close, but I deflected anyway.
“Of course not. Why would I be?”
“That sounds like a lie.”
“It isn’t.”
“Lying to me is going to be difficult.”
Under her relentless questioning, I finally had no choice but to nod.
“We have a match against a K League 1 team coming up. How am I supposed to not be nervous?”
“You’re a second-division side. Losing to a first-division team wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it?”
“No. It would. We’re aiming for the top of K League 1. If we get demolished here by a mid-to-upper-table K League side, that is a problem.”
Yu-gyeong made a face as if she could not quite believe what she was hearing.
Fair enough. To someone who barely cared about sports, the gap between the second division and the first probably looked enormous. That was on me to understand.
“Yu-gyeong, going head-to-head with a first-division team is how we find out exactly where we stand right now. You get that, don’t you?”
“I understand that much.”
“And we are Hanul. We have to be the best — no exceptions. If we’re taking Hanul’s sponsorship, then even if we lose, it has to be to a top-tier K1 side. We cannot afford to go down here.”
I had stretched the logic a little, but Yu-gyeong seemed to force herself to accept it. She nodded, at least.
I sighed again and started searching up Anyang Purples.
“Chairman, you should be working right now.”
“You saw me finish everything this morning, didn’t you?”
“Haa…”
Yu-gyeong let out a long breath, the look of a mother watching her daughter claim to study while goofing off. A spark of mischief hit me, and I decided to mess with her.
“Mom, can I get some coffee?”
“Chairman?”
“…Yes. I’m sorry.”
The look she gave me said she would end me if I pushed any further, so I backed off. Instead, I turned to the Anyang Purples highlights that had just come up in the search results.
Anyang Purples basically played out of a 4-3-3, but they shifted the shape meaningfully as matches developed.
The real keys were their fierce high press and the speed of their transitions out of the back.
The whole team moved like a single will — flipping from defense to attack in an instant and turning those moments into goals.
If the squad quality held up, it was a solid system. And of course, systems like that were not without their cracks.
One was the finishing. They needed a genuine goal scorer to make the system truly sing. Being a mid-to-upper-table K League 1 side, though, they almost certainly had enough cutting edge to hurt us — so that was not a problem we would be the ones exploiting.
The other was…
“Stamina. That’s going to be it.”
Stamina.
Korean players tend to be strong aerobically in their youth years, but once they age into the professional game, that fitness stops being an automatic advantage.
Which is why systems that demand massive energy expenditure tend to see Korean sides fade badly in the second half. Anyang Purples would not be free of that problem either.
And if someone like me could spot the pattern, there was no chance Feltner had missed it.
I’m curious, though… Should I ask?
“Hey, Yu-gyeong.”
“Yes, Representative.”
“If I messaged Feltner right now and said, ‘I’m curious about the tactics for the next match — could you walk me through them?’ would that be overstepping?”
Yu-gyeong thought for a moment, then shook her head.
“You’re the owner of the club. I don’t see why it would be a problem.”
Okay. Yu-gyeong said it was fine — so I would not do it.
When a complete outsider says something is fine, what they really mean is that it absolutely is not.
I would not ask. I would trust them and wait.
Trust the manager I had chosen, and the players he had chosen.
With that thought settling in, I decided to rewatch some of our other K League 2 matches instead.
A base 4-3-3. Possession soccer built from the back with methodical structure.
Passes circulating with real cohesion, even the defenders pouring into the attack in an extreme attacking shape.
And the moment the ball was lost, every nearby player snapped into the press — Gegenpressing.
Of course, the Gegenpressing was still riddled with mistakes.
Thump!
Crack! Smack! Thud-thud-thud!
Even now, mid-buildup, Seo Dong-hyeon lost the ball and immediately handed the other side a counterattack.
If Nam Gi-cheol had not been there to shut it down, it would have been a guaranteed one-on-one — a goal at worst.
Seongjin Hanul FC’s soccer was a high-quality possession game rarely seen in Korea, but it still carried plenty of flaws.
How Anyang Purples would try to punish those flaws, and how we would answer that system in return.
It was a moment that left me equal parts worried and excited.
Not that any of that mattered for long.
“Um, Chairman.”
“Yes?”
“The company report you asked for last time just went up.”
“I’ll take a look.”
Time for me to do some actual work.
There was a limit to how much of a freeloader you could be. Even as the company representative, nobody was going to greenlight twenty-four-hour salary theft.