Fearful Incheon United

“Look forward to the big storm from Incheon.”

On January 29 at Incheon city hall, “Crown Prince” of the Korean Olympic soccer team Choi Tae-wook (23-year-old) moved from Anyang LG to the new Incheon United FC at the highest ever transfer money of 1.1 billion won. Werner Rorant, the team’s coach from Germany, surprised the participants by commenting, “My goal is to win the championship this year.”

Ahn Jong-bok, the head of Incheon United, corrected, “He might be aiming too high” to make it a kind of joke, but it is not usual for a coach of a new team to boast. It seems that he is convinced that the team will blast strong winds in this season of K-league.

The topic of soccer world is Incheon United only two months before K-league opens. Historically, a new team performs poorly in its debut year. However, Incheon United has something different. The team itself and outside experts have evaluated that Incheon is quite different from the past new teams.

On February 5, Incheon had the most number of visitors per hour during last 12 weeks, which the ranking analyzing site, ‘www.rankey.com’ investigated on 25 domestic and abroad soccer teams’ home pages. The homepage of Incheon (www.Incheonutd.com) recorded 2362 visitors a day to surpass Suwon Samsung (2286). It is an exceptional case that a new team has become the most popular team within only four months after the site opened. It shows that fans are wild about Incheon. Why?

First, the capacity of the team is strong. Two top strikers, Radonchichi, who played for Serbia Montenegro youth national team, and Choi Tae-wook are excellent goal scorers. The power will be doubled if 19-year-old quick Radonchichi and well-developed Choi Tae-wook can gel with each other.

Ozalan of Turkey national team, Kim Hyun-soo, and Lee Sang-heon of the Korean national team form the best defense line of K-league. Experts analyze that Incheon can aim at finishing the year strong despite some disadvantages such as poor right midfielders and a lack of backup players. It is possible because Incheon spent 10 billion won alone in acquiring players.

Incheon citizens reacted enthusiastically to the first Incheon soccer team. It is an example that the 15 billion won which Incheon raised by creating a fund that was collected in only a month by the Incheon citizen’s subscription stocks. The second fund had a goal of five billion won which was exceeded by 1.575 billion won as of February 5. The amount raised from the citizens alone, not including companies’ contributions, reached approximately 900 million won.

The other reason is that Choi Tae-wook, Lee Sang-heon, Joo Ho-jin and Ahn Seong-hoon are from Incheon and graduated from Bupyung High School. It is expected that they will be the center of the attention. Now it only remains for Incheon’s big storm to be true.

Jong-Koo Yang yjongk@donga.com