Home > Sports > More

As Korea's sports base erodes, fewer elite athletes will reach the peak

Published: 30 Mar. 2026, 07:00

Korea defender Park Jin-seob kneels on the ground in disappointment after Korea loses 1-0 to Japan in the East Asian Cup in July 2025. [YONHAP]

Falling birth numbers, hollowed-out school leagues and a broken development ladder are eating away at Korea’s competitiveness in elite sports.

Saki Iijima spent more than a decade in Japan’s women’s basketball league as a “sixth man,” meaning a player who came off the bench but nonetheless impacted games, becoming known for her defense and doing the dirty work. After arriving in Korea last year near the end of her career, she quickly lifted BNK and Hana Bank, two teams long seen as underdogs, into the top tier.

This season, she even finished first in All-Star voting. Fans nicknamed her “Sagi-kae” — a play on words combining her first name with gaming slang that likens a character's performance to an unfair advantage.

The way a veteran role player came in and immediately changed the landscape of the Korean league has become a telling symbol of the reality facing Korea’s elite sports system. The problem is no longer limited to one struggling event or one disappointing team. Across the board, the athlete pool is thinning and the development base that once sustained Korean sports is beginning to crack.

Signs of strain are already appearing in multiple sports at once. Baseball, football, basketball and even golf, once among the proudest pillars of Korean sport, no longer seem to have the same depth or force they once did. The real issue is not simply the results themselves, but the fact that the foundation that should produce those results is disappearing fast.

Since modern times, sports have held a special place in Korean society. At a time when Korea could barely imagine overtaking Japan in other fields, sports was one of the first areas that gave the country a sense that it could win. Victories on the international stage meant more than medals or trophies: They helped create a broader feeling that Korea, too, could compete and prevail.

“Sport may be one reason Korea moved ahead of Japan in per capita GDP,” said Kim Jong-hyo, a research professor at Seoul National University. “But at a time when K-semiconductors, K-pop, K-dramas and K-beauty are sweeping the world, sports is the field that hit its peak first and is now coming down.”

Saki Iijima of Bucheon Hana Bank [WOMEN'S KOREAN BASKETBALL LEAGUE]

The biggest problem is the collapse of the base. The school sports system and youth athlete pool that once supported Korea’s elite pipeline are shrinking rapidly.

At 5:20 a.m. on March 11, the sound of blades cuts through the silence at Mokdong Ice Rink in western Seoul. Only four or five elementary school skaters are on the ice. The rink, long known as a “gold medal factory” that produced generations of Korean speed skating stars, is no longer turning the way it once did.

The people on the ground feel the change most sharply. “Ten to 15 years ago, standout skaters grew by competing against one another, but now there are simply too few athletes,” one coach said.

The numbers tell the same story. There were 640,000 births in 1998, the year short track skater and former Olympic gold medalist Choi Min-jeong was born. That figure fell to 470,000 in 2004, the birth year of this year's gold medalist Kim Gil-li, and has since almost halved, to 250,000 in 2025. The drop in athlete numbers has been even steeper. The number of short track skaters on school teams fell from 117 in 2022 to just 23 this year.

Because short track is a race of placement rather than time alone, there are now cases in which a skater circles the rink alone in competition.

Japan’s Shohei Ohtani, center, celebrates after hitting a solo home run during the Group C game between Korea and Japan in the 2026 World Baseball Classic at Tokyo Dome in Tokyo on March 7. [YONHAP]

The problem is not unique to skating. Elite sport is supposed to work like a pyramid, with a broad base supporting the small number who rise to the top. In Korea, however, the bottom of that pyramid is giving way.

The youth population is shrinking, school sports are weakening and school teams are disappearing one by one. Once that happens, a decline in competitiveness at the national team and professional levels becomes only a matter of time.

Cases abroad make the point even clearer. The Netherlands, with a population of 18 million, and Norway, with just 5.4 million, continue to produce world-class athletes in football and Olympic sports not because they are large countries, but because a high percentage of their population actually play sports, and because the links between everyday participation, school sports and elite development remain intact.

In Korea, by contrast, school sports are being hollowed out. With schools increasingly burdened by complaints and safety concerns, physical education has been pushed aside, and operating athletic teams has become harder and harder.

Coaches hesitate to be overly proactive for fear that their guidance will be taken as abuse, while athletes often fail to adapt to self-directed training and drift into a state of confusion. The old, harsher coercive model has weakened, but the healthy culture and system that should have replaced it still has not fully taken root.

Yuki Ishikawa of Japan spikes the ball against during their pool phase match against Libya at the 2025 FIVB Volleyball Men's World Championship in Quezon City, Philippines, on Sept. 17, 2025. [AP/YONHAP]

For years, Korea followed the opposite path. Once young athletes chose the elite track, they were effectively forced to give up everything else for the sake of their sport, and failure often meant the collapse of the rest of their lives as well.

Minimum academic standards were introduced to protect students’ right to learn, but cases such as table tennis star Shin Yu-bin, who did not attend high school, remain far from rare. As it stands, Korea’s school sports system neither supports elite athletes nor ordinary students.

Korean women's curling team members Seol Ye-eun, left, and Kim Su-ji sweep during the delivery of the final stone in the fourth end of their round-robin match against Japan at the Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium during the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, on Feb. 15. [YONHAP]

What Korea needs, in the end, is not a few more exceptional stars but the restoration of structure. It needs to revive school sports, expand participation among ordinary students and rebuild the ladder linking local clubs, school teams and elite development.

There is no quick fix that will suddenly lift results, but if that connective tissue is not rebuilt, the current slump may prove to be not a temporary downturn, but the start of a long decline.

“Korea has to move in a direction where elite athletes and ordinary students can coexist,” said Lee Jong-seong, a professor of sports industry at Hanyang University. “This is the kind of structural shift that takes years. Korea needs the patience to think in decades.”

A sports system that depends on one gifted athlete at a time cannot last. What Korean sport needs now is not another prodigy to suddenly burst into bloom. What it needs is to better care for the ground and soil from which all athletes can grow.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
BY PARK RIN, LEE HAY-JUNE [[email protected]]