Building Team Identity Through Place Attachment: A Case of a Korean Professional Soccer Club

Abstract

Professional soccer leagues in East Asian countries (China, Korea, and Japan) have a relatively short history compared to those in Europe. For instance, Korea’s K-League was launched in 1983 as the first professional soccer league among East Asian countries (e.g., China’s Super League in 2000 and Japan’s J-League in 1992). However, dwindling fan attendance over the past decade has challenged K-League and severe damage from a devastating match fixing scandal that took place in 2011. Given that the league recently adopted a promotion and relegation system in 2012, clubs are now even more challenged to build a strong and sustainable fan base. From a social identity perspective, the present chapter examines how local and regional identity help construct team identification and team loyalty. The first part of the chapter briefly reviews K-League’s 30-year his- tory. The second part of the chapter applies the theory of social identity construction to explore the relationship between place attachment and team identification by conducting in-depth interviews with spectators of the first supporter-owned club in K-League history—Daejeon Citizen.