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Gerrard, Rooney and more: How Nexon brought real life football legends to Korea

Published: 16 Oct. 2025, 19:13 Updated: 16 Oct. 2025, 19:32

CHO YONG-JUN
[email protected]

Nexon Vice President of Business Operations Park Jeong-moo speaks at the 2025 Korea JoongAng Daily Forum celebrating the 25th anniversary of the paper’s founding, held at the Lotte Hotel in Jung District, central Seoul, on Oct. 16. [PARK SANG-MOON]

Nexon, one of the most renowned game publishers in Korea, is also known for servicing football games FC Online and FC Mobile. The publisher, however, wanted to elevate its football legacy beyond the digital realm by launching a real-world football match featuring legendary players competing against one another.

This is how the Icons Match in 2024 and this year came to be, according to Nexon’s vice president of business operations, Park Jeong-moo, during the 2025 Korea JoongAng Daily Forum on Thursday, which took place at the Lotte Hotel in central Seoul.

“There were no football-related mega events, so we decided to make one ourselves,” said Park, who led the Icons Match project, during Thursday’s Korea JoongAng Daily Forum.

The Nexon Icons Match in 2024 and the Icons Match held in September were special football match events organized by Nexon and hosted by the football charity Shoot For Love, featuring many former football players that almost every fan would recognize.

The two events were both loved by football fans, but at the same time, they may have wondered — why is Nexon, a game publisher, hosting such a big real-life football spectacle?

It was all because they needed a big hyped-up event for their online games to perform well, according to Nexon's vice president.

Park, who had previously led the management of Nexon’s online football game FIFA Online 3, FC Online and FC Mobile, was invited as the second speaker of the Korea JoongAng Daily forum to talk about the significance of the Icons Match.

The 2024 Nexon Icons Match, held Oct. 19 and 20 at the Seoul World Cup Stadium, invited renowned ex-footballers Didier Drogba, Alessandro Del Piero, Park Ji-Sung, Thierry Henry and many more for an event football match, pleasantly surprising both Korean and overseas football fans with its star-filled lineup.

Shield United celebrate after winning the 2025 Nexon Icons Match at Seoul World Cup Stadium in western Seoul. [NEXON]

This year’s Icons Match expanded the lineup, inviting new legends like Ronaldinho, Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Rio Ferdinand, Gianluigi Buffon, Iker Casillas, Claudio Marchisio and Alessandro Nesta, on top of bringing in Arsène Wenger and Rafael Benítez as the coaches of the two teams, just to drop a few names.

Park explained that big events in Korean football, such as the national team performing well in the World Cup, Asian Games and Olympics, have a meaningful effect on FC Online and FC Mobile — but only if the outcome is positive. For example, the total revenue, active users and duration time of users at FC Online all significantly rose in 2023, following the national football team’s strong performance at the Qatar World Cup, held in December 2022.

“But we couldn’t expect such a boost in 2024, as many of the expected mega events were called off due to the national team’s poor performance, on top of other issues related to the coach getting sacked,” he said.

“So instead of relying on outside factors, we just decided to create the environment ourselves.”

Despite it being an unprecedented event — a game publisher inviting legendary football players to Korea for a match — the team managed to convince both the company and the ex-footballers to pitch in.

“There have been instances of inviting a football club or a national football team to Korea, but this was the first time star footballers were invited to come play individually,” Park said.

“We conducted preliminary research looking into which football players were friends with whom, and we first invited the player who was at the center of the connection circle.”

Park said they even had cases where footballers invited each other to the match.

“This ended up becoming a Nexon-created fictional universe, similar to a Marvel cinematic universe,” he said.

Nexon also tried to add a narrative to the Icons Match, so it didn’t end up being just a two-day-long event. The team created multiple campaign videos featuring the footballers, creating a storyline of the popular players gathering up for a standoff, which hit its climax at the stadium in real life.

“For the fathers, they got to see the icons of their generation play again, and for the kids, they got to see these same icons — which to them were previously only seen in video games — on the field,” Park explained.

A combined number of 200,000 fans watched the Icons Match event live in 2024 and this year, while event-related videos and short-form clips exceeded 780 million views — a number higher than all the view counts of all the FC Online and FC Mobile related videos in the past four years, according to Nexon.

“We tried to bring the digital experience of the fans into real life and make it an experience that can also connect different generations,” Park said.

“Nexon will continue to think of ways to bring fantasies to life, or to be the fantasy itself.”

BY CHO YONG-JUN [[email protected]]