Football Season Guide

Sangju Sangmu are a unique football club that doesn’t own any players. With 2-year military service in Korea mandatory every player from another club that enters the military stops playing for their actual owners and plays for Sangju during this 2-year period. This means that every season lots of players leave and many new ones arrive. In the off-season Sangju was joined by 16 new faces that started their military service. Last season was very good for the team that was expected to fight for survival, with the 55 points collected the highest every point tally for Sangju in a season. Ultimately it led to seventh place in the standings and very calm campaign. Coach Tae-wan Kim, in charge since 2016, had to part ways with as many as 8 of his regulars in the winter though and once again he has been building from scratch. The new badge of military personnel seems pretty talented though. It includes 3 regulars from 2019 runner-up Ulsan and 2 more players from champions Jeonbuk. Another exciting arrival is that of Suwon’s 20-year-old playmaker Se-jin Jeon, seen as one of the best talents coming out of Korea for his age group. As always creating team spirit from players that come together from many different clubs for limited period of time will be challenging, but this is where coach Kim has excelled very well in recent years. He will have further challenge in 2020 though with the delayed start of the season creating issues. Korea won’t be recruiting fresh badge of militaries in July due to the COVID-19 situation, while at the same time as many as 6 players from the current squad come to the end of their service in June and will be returning to their parent clubs. With that in mind strong start to the campaign will be vital in search of safety. Striker Jin-hyeok Kim is reliable goalscorer, but even bigger things are expected from winger Seon-min Mun who racked up 10 goals and 9 assists in 2019 for champions Jeonbuk.