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Ha Hyun-seung went to his manager the night before the final and asked to start against Japan. He had already thrown 90 pitches against Taiwan and 33 more in relief against Japan in the super round, and by his own account his arm was not fresh. He got the ball anyway. Seven innings later, Korea had beaten Japan 2-0 at the Taipei Dome, its first U-18 Asian Championship title since 2018, and the 18-year-old left-hander from Busan High School (부산고) had a line that reads like a typo: 7 innings, 89 pitches, 1 hit, 2 walks, 8 strikeouts, 0 runs. If you follow Korea vs Japan baseball at any level, that is the box score of the year so far. And the guy who produced it turned down $3 million from the New York Yankees to enter the KBO draft next Monday. The Numbers From Taipei The final started at 6:30 pm on Sept. 13 in Taipei (7:30 pm KST, 6:30 am ET, 11:30 am UK), the last game of the 14th BFA U-18 Asian Championship, per Japan's own schedule page , which lists it as 19:30 JST. The resu...

An Se-young hasn't dropped a single game in eleven matches since early August. She's the reigning world No. 1 in women's singles, she's held that ranking for 100 straight weeks as of Sept. 8, and she's about to walk into an Asian Games where no Korean badminton player — man or woman — has ever defended a singles gold. Ask her about the pressure, though, and she won't take the bait: "Every match, every player is a rival. You never know what problems might arise during a game," she told reporters this month. That refusal to relax is basically the whole story of South Korea's build-up to the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, which open Sept. 19 across Aichi Prefecture and Nagoya, Japan, and run through Oct. 4. An arrives with two golds from Hangzhou already in hand and arguably the best form of her career behind her. She still won't say the word "favorite" out loud. A Title Defense Built on Playing Through Pain The form is the part worth si...

Shin Sang-woo says South Korea's women want to change the color of their Asian Games medal, and when a reporter asked if that meant gold, his answer was one word: yes, The Korea Times reported this month. Their first opponent on Monday is coached by the man Shin replaced. Colin Bell ran South Korea's women's program from October 2019 to June 2024, when the Korea Football Association ended the deal by mutual consent , citing a need for "a change to take the next step." His record was solid: 24 wins, 10 draws, 15 losses across 49 matches. He'd also spent the 2023 World Cup publicly picking apart the domestic WK League's lack of relegation, calling its playoff system "nonsensical." Shin Sang-woo took over, and Bell resurfaced this year in charge of Myanmar, ranked 55th in the world to South Korea's 19th. Nobody expects Myanmar to actually win Monday's match in Osaka. The story is that South Korea's opening kickoff at the tournament it ...

Lee Dong-gyeong delivered a free-kick assist in the 53rd minute, then scored himself three minutes later, and by full time Ulsan HD had beaten Incheon United 2-1 and their midfielder had become the first Korean-born player in K League history to post double-digit goals and double-digit assists in two straight seasons. It happened on home turf at Ulsan Munsu Football Stadium on September 12, in round 29 of the 2026 Hana Bank K League 1 season, as SBS first reported it. Jung Seung-hyun met Lee's left-footed set piece to make it 10 assists on the year; Lee's own strike a few minutes later made it 10 goals. Ten and ten, for the second September running. If you don't follow the K League closely, here's the quick version of why that stat line matters: goals and assists pull from different skill sets, and a midfielder who's good at both, every year, is rare anywhere. Lee's now done it twice running, which nobody born in Korea had managed before him. Why Only One ...

Kim Do-kyun called it a promotion playoff before it even kicked off. His Seoul E-Land side arrived at Mokdong Stadium on a nine-match unbeaten run, one point behind league leaders Suwon Samsung, and the home coach wasn't shy about the stakes going in. "It's like a promotion playoff," Kim said, per kukinews . "But I think our players are in good enough shape to handle it." Suwon's answer came in the 10th minute. Kim Min-woo won a free kick, headed it down, and Dubickas finished from close range. The goal held up for the full 90. Final score, per Money Today : Suwon Samsung 1, Seoul E-Land 0, on Sept. 12. Suwon's Nine-Game Run Just Got Louder Seoul E-Land actually put together the better run of chances at home. Didn't matter. Suwon Samsung's own unbeaten run extended to nine games, and Seoul E-Land's identical streak snapped on the same afternoon. That's a genuinely rare split result. Two clubs rode the exact same win streak into a...

Every press release out of the KBO (Korea Baseball Organization) this season leans on the word "record." Usually that kind of self-praise deserves a raised eyebrow. This time the actual numbers undersell it. The league hit 9 million fans in 505 games on Aug. 11 — the fastest any KBO season has reached that mark, 23 games quicker than 2025's pace, according to the Korea Herald . Fifteen days and 60 games later, it was 10 million, in 565 games, 22 games faster than the previous record, per Hankyung . League-wide seat occupancy was already running at 86.7 percent through late July, up from 82.2 percent at the same point last year, with average attendance climbing to nearly 18,000 a game — Korea Herald's numbers again . The Fastest 10 Million in KBO History Context makes this weirder than it sounds. This isn't a league discovering baseball for the first time. The KBO topped 10 million spectators in each of the last two seasons too. What's new is the pace. Ever...

"The big goal is to change the color of our medal," South Korea women's national coach Shin Sang-woo said ahead of the 2026 Asian Games. Fair enough — except the team standing between South Korea and anything better than bronze is North Korea, the side South Korea has beaten exactly once in 21 meetings since 2005. That rematch is now locked into the calendar. South Korea opens Group F against Myanmar on September 14, plays Bangladesh on the 17th, then meets North Korea on September 21 in Fukuroi, a city about 100 kilometers east of Nagoya — all three kickoffs at either 4:00 p.m. or 7:30 p.m. local time, which is also Korea Standard Time since Japan and South Korea share the same clock. The head-to-head is lopsided, and the ranking gap is real South Korea sits 19th and North Korea 11th in FIFA's women's world ranking , published June 16 and still the most recent edition heading into the Games (the next update isn't due until October 20). Group F rounds out ...

FC Seoul got hit with an 8 million won fine on September 10 over a banner its own fans put up five days earlier. The wording is the actual story here, not just the money. The banner appeared in the home end at Seoul World Cup Stadium during the Round 27 K League 1 match against Incheon United on September 5, a game FC Seoul won 1-0 on an own goal after Incheon defender Kim Geon-hee was sent off with a direct red card in the third minute, per Sportal Korea . It was Seoul's fifth straight win. As of September 9, FC Seoul sits 1st in K League 1 on 59 points from 28 games, with Incheon down in 7th on 37 points from 27, per the standings on Incheon United's own club site . Written in a mix of Hangul and Chinese characters, the banner read "Jeondal + Jogeon = UTD." Two of those words are jabs: "Jeondal" references a 2024 incident where Incheon United fans threw water bottles onto the pitch, and "Jogeon" swaps in the character for "thief" to n...

The Korea Football Association added two Korean coaches to Robert Moreno's staff on Thursday, and the reason it gave says almost as much as the news itself: someone needed to actually talk to everybody in the building. Cho Yong-hyung joins the field coaching staff under assistant Eduardo Docampo, working as the go-between for Moreno's foreign coaches, the players, and the K League clubs those players answer to every week. Lee Jae-hong slots into the physical performance unit under fitness coach Javier Chocarro, managing conditioning for a squad split between K League match schedules and whatever their clubs in Europe or MLS are doing that same week. Both appointments came out of a review by the KFA's National Team Committee, done after a meeting with Moreno's own overseas staff. Not the federation acting alone, per Sedaily . The two stay on through the rest of Moreno's contract, six matches running to November 27. Who Cho Yong-hyung and Lee Jae-hong Actually Ar...

Kim Do-yeong broke his nose on a bunt gone wrong, one day after becoming the first Korean-born hitter to hit 40 home runs in a KBO season since 2018. He was pulled from Wednesday's game against NC with a heavy nosebleed, X-rayed at a Gwangju hospital, and diagnosed with a nasal fracture that now puts both KIA's playoff push and his Asian Games roster spot in question. The mechanics were almost funny, if they hadn't ended with him leaving the field bleeding. Fourth inning, nobody out, KIA down at home to NC Dinos. Kim squared to bunt on the first pitch from NC starter Song Myung-gi — a 148 km/h fastball — and the ball caromed straight off his own bat into his face as he broke for first. He was substituted immediately and driven to KIA's team hospital for X-rays and a CT scan, per SBS . The play that caused it was almost nothing — a bunt attempt on the first pitch, the kind that ends a hundred at-bats a season without anyone noticing. The scan came back positive for a...

Roberto Moreno lands in Seoul this weekend, and by Monday he has to justify his picks to the entire country. The Korea Football Association confirmed the interim coach arrives September 13 with his full staff and names his first squad the next day at the Korea Football Park in Cheonan. Two home friendlies already went on the calendar back in early August: Ecuador on September 24, and Uruguay four days later. Two more matches, against Venezuela and Uzbekistan in October, round out the block Moreno actually signed up for. Neither opener is the soft restart you'd expect for a post-World Cup rebuild. Ecuador sits 25th in the FIFA rankings, Uruguay 20th, both a few spots above Korea's own No. 32, and both just played the real World Cup this summer, unlike Korea, whose group-stage exit is the entire reason Hong Myung-bo isn't the one naming this squad. Korea Times has the full backstory on how the fixtures came together. Here's the confirmed schedule, straight from starn...

Busan IPark led K League 2 as recently as July. As of September 8, 2026 KST, they're sixth, winless in eight straight, and their top scorer just got banned for two months over a drunk driving stop. The player is Christian Renato, a 26-year-old Brazilian striker who joined Busan this season and immediately became the team's best attacking threat: 8 goals and 4 assists in 24 league appearances, both team highs. Police caught him driving under the influence on September 7. Busan found out, pulled him from training and team activities within a day, and reported it to the league themselves rather than waiting to get caught out. The Korea Professional Football League responded fast too. A 60-day "activity suspension," announced September 8, bars him from every K League-related activity while a formal disciplinary committee decides his real punishment. That process can run as long as 90 days ( Herald Business ). From First to Sixth: Inside Busan's Eight-Match Collapse...

Short version: South Korea's football federation is now deciding whether to discipline a referee over an allegation that she told a fellow official one of the country's greatest players "must be on her period." The player is Ji So-yun — yes, the same Ji So-yun who spent eight years running Chelsea's midfield — and as of this posting, the case has a disciplinary committee and no hearing date. That gap between "opened a case" and "actually did something" is most of this story right now, and it's worth reading past the headline for the parts that don't fit neatly into either side. The Match, and What Ji Says She Heard It happened on August 28, in a WK League match between Ji's club, Suwon FC Women, and Seoul City Hall. Ji went to the referee to protest a call, wanting a penalty. She says that over the officials' communication system, she heard the referee tell a fellow official: "She's been touchy since the start, she ...