The FCB fan club ‘Red Light Korea’ was founded in 2019 and consists only of women. Ahead of FC Bayern's first visit to the East Asian peninsula, we visited three of the fans in the capital Seoul. They not only want to make FC Bayern more widely known, but also shift South Korea's football culture as a whole towards something more female.
Since Kay became a football fan around ten years ago, the Korean woman has regularly had to listen to sarcastic comments. First from her professor at university, then later from colleagues in the office. “Why are you interested in football?” they often say. Or: “Do you even know what the offside rule is?” Kay is sure that “every female football fan in South Korea has to listen to the same comments”. But the 33-year-old is not deterred: she is sticking to her passion for football – and is no longer alone.
Red Light Korea fan club has over 70 members
In 2014, she was watching the World Cup on TV – rather casually, to distract herself from the stress of her final exams at university – when Germany were playing Algeria. The very second Thomas Müller waved into the camera with a smile while singing the national anthem, Kay was hooked. “I liked him immediately,” she said, “and after the World Cup I asked myself which games I needed to watch to see more of Thomas Müller. I've been an FC Bayern fan ever since.”
In 2019, she and two friends finally founded South Korea's first all-female Bayern fan club. ‘Red Light Korea’ is a kind of 'safe space' where female fans can share their passion for football without having to worry about annoying comments. The name was chosen deliberately: the colour red stands for luck and prosperity in East Asia – while of course also symbolising the strength of Bayern. The fans too want to shine a spotlight on women in football, who, according to Kay, “still have too little visibility”. They began as a loose online group of a few like-minded fans and are now an officially registered Bayern fan club with over 70 members.
This summer, they will have their first opportunity to see their favourite team live in South Korea. On 3 August, Bayern will face Tottenham Hotspur during the 2024 Audi Summer Tour. The Seoul World Cup Stadium will be filled to the last of its 67,000 seats as Korea's two biggest international stars, Minjae Kim and Heung-min Son, face off.
Student Young-eun is also eagerly awaiting the event. She became interested in football during the 2018 World Cup in Russia, when South Korea knocked the German national team out of the tournament in the group stage.
Bayern’s admirable mentality
Given that the Bundesliga was the only European league shown for free on TV, she soon watched her first Bayern matches. And then searched for interviews with the players on YouTube. “I was particularly impressed by the team's mentality,” says Young-eun. “Bayern are confident without ever being arrogant after winning. That impressed me.”
Because she wanted to understand her idols like Joshua Kimmich and Manuel Neuer in their native language, she began to learn German and took a language course in Bonn. “I'm now studying German literature, and FC Bayern is the direct cause of that,” she says –as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
„Bayern are confident without ever being arrogant after winning. That impressed me.”
Young-eun
Football is a true national sport in South Korea and is roughly on a par with baseball in the popularity rankings. Koreans probably first encountered the round leather ball at the end of the 19th century, when British soldiers from the Royal Navy passed the time with a game of football during a stopover at Incheon harbour. However, a professional football league, now known as the ‘K League’, only developed in the early 1980s.
A Bayern boom in Korea: thanks to Minjae
The Korean national team has been coached by European coaches for a long time. Dutchman Guus Hiddink led them to the semi-finals of the 2002 World Cup on home soil, where they were eliminated by Germany and an inspired Oliver Kahn. Korean sports pubs have mainly been showing Premier League matches since the celebrated national hero Heung-min Son started playing there.
Bayern can now also benefit from a similar boom thanks to Minjae. Since the 27-year-old started playing for the Reds, public television has been broadcasting more and more Bayern matches. In January, he was voted ‘Player of the Year’ by the Korean Football Association. Kim's popularity is also reflected in the membership figures of FC Bayern München eV: around 1,000 Koreans have joined the German record champions in the past 12 months.
The Red Light Korea fans come from all over Korea. Many live in the Seoul metropolitan area but co-founder Kay, for example, lives in the north of the country, not far from the border with North Korea. Her workplace is surrounded by several army bases. Because the members are dotted around and the time difference to Germany is seven hours, they rarely meet in person. Instead, they cheer on their team together in a live stream – usually via the Discord app, where fans can chat or send audio messages.
Commitment to women's rights and equality
The female Bayern fans are wholly committed to women's rights and equality. This is not par for the course in conservative South Korea. The East Asian so-called ‘Tiger State’ has, in many respects, arrived in the future with the production of high-quality semiconductors and the ubiquitous availability of ultra-fast internet, but society is still strongly patriarchal in some respects.
South Korea still has the widest gender income gap of all OECD countries. However, the feminist movement has also experienced massive growth in recent years. “Koreans have now developed a greater awareness of women's rights,” says Kay. “But there are still many points of contention between the sexes.”
A personal letter to Thomas Müller
In recent years, the number of female spectators in South Korean stadiums has risen noticeably. The fact that the advertising market and television producers are also increasingly discovering female fans as a target audience has a lot to do with the rise of the women's national team, which is currently ranked 20th in the FIFA rankings. The Red Light Korea members are eagerly awaiting the summer.
Kay is a ‘Summer Tour’ veteran. In 2017, she flew to Shanghai all by herself to watch her team play in China. At Shenzhen airport, she was able to present Müller with a personal letter. “It's an experience I'll never have again,” said Kay, overwhelmed. But maybe she was wrong. After all, FC Bayern is coming to Korea for the first time in August 2024.
© Images: Tina Hsu
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