A soccer player, who has experienced both K3 (part 3) and K4 (part 4) stages, hinted in a phone call with a reporter that some teams belonging to K4 are avoiding promotion to K3. The Korea Football Association is making efforts to establish a promotion system from K1 to K7 (part 1 to part 7), just like the European big leagues such as England. A said in a confident voice that Changwon City Hall will win the promotion and playoff match between Changwon City Hall (K3) and Jinju City Football Team (K4) and remain in the third division. “Wait and see if I’m right,” he said. 스포츠토토
The match between the two teams at Changwon Stadium on Saturday ended with Changwon City Hall’s 2-0 win as A said, and Changwon City Hall managed to survive in the third division. Given the difference in league level, it is common for a K3 team to beat a K4. However, a soccer official who is well aware of K4 said, “Changwon City Hall’s performance this season was not good. Some said Jinju citizens were better at the player level,” adding, “It was a game worth a try.” B also doubted the background, saying Jinju operated some rotations without fully deploying all of its best power.
C, a former K4 player, suspected the scene where Jinju midfielders slowly joined the defense in a counterattack, the scene where Jinju goalkeeper failed to shoot his body and lost two goals in vain to Sung Bong-jae, and the scene where one of Jinju’s defenders did not run towards the goal in the second run. “There is no defender in the world who does not reach out to the opponent who breaks through one-on-one situations and stop him. There were many scenes that would tilt one’s head if he were a former player,” he said, raising suspicions of “intentional defeat.” The Korea Football Association denied the allegation, saying, “A representative from the association watched the game on the spot. It was not a problematic game.”
A, B, and C, as well as other K3 and K4 officials, agreed that it would be “no big surprise.” Taking their remarks together, the vast majority of K4 teams are virtually refusing to be promoted to K3 due to practical issues such as budget. It is known that the annual budget of K4 teams is as little as 500 million won, or as much as 1.2 billion won. K3 spends 3 billion won excluding some teams such as the Yangju Citizens’ Soccer Team. The gap between K3 and K4 is huge. According to regulations, K4 can have up to 10 social service personnel (public interest). Social service personnel who receive an annual salary of hundreds of millions of won are required to receive only 400,000 to 500,000 won (approx. In other words, the monthly labor costs for social service personnel are approximately 5 million won, or 60 million won per year. Rumors are that K3 is paid 2 to 3 million won each, including various allowances, in the name of salaries, to high-profile players.
In contrast, K3 is not allowed to have social service personnel. All players have annual salary contracts. Even if 20 players with the lowest annual salary of 20 million won (18,400 U.S. dollars) alone, the annual salary for a player is 400 million won (364,800 dollars). Some players in K3 earn 70 to 80 million won (743,800 dollars) per year, up to 100 million won (820,800 dollars). K4 teams that spend 500 million to 700 million won (464,800 dollars) cannot afford to handle such expenses. Furthermore, if K4 teams are promoted to K3, they cannot afford to have social service personnel, and thus have to make new arrangements. Social service personnel belonging to K4 teams that have been promoted must be transferred to other K4 teams. This translates into social service personnel belonging to the Yeoju Citizens’ Soccer Team that was promoted this season.
For K4 teams with insufficient budget, it is not easy to maintain competitiveness in K3. Among the teams that were immediately demoted after one season, there were cases where the budget was cut and the coaching staff changed. For this reason, there is a widespread atmosphere that “promotion is not as good as promotion.” In K4, it is possible to witness that teams that did well in the first half of the year are falling sharply except for the main players in the second half. Dangjin Citizens’ Soccer Team, which won the National Sports Festival in October, is a representative example. “Three years ago, there was a controversy that a K4 club continued to send non-mainstream players to the game and refused to be promoted. I remember that I ended up doing nothing more than taking disciplinary action,” A said. Even now, three years later, little seems to have changed.
The Korea Football Association operates a “division system” consisting of parts one to seven. The K-League 2 and K3, and K4 and K5 are not in operation yet, but the two walls will also be broken down from 2026. However, the “invisible wall” that blocked K3 and K4 is high before that. Under this circumstance, the same phenomenon of avoidance of promotion should not occur between K2 and K3, and K4 and K5. Whether or not there is a problem with the current regulation of professional social service personnel joining the K4 only, how long the soccer team should be controlled by the city (province) budget, whether or not the association’s division system itself is problematic, and whether the league is self-sustaining, whether or not the third or fourth divisions are in the league, will be a matter of concern to the entire soccer community. If this continues, people can’t even dream of a normal promotion system, the Korean version of Luton Town, and the K-League version of Jamie Body.