Cha Du-ri earns first manager award as low-budget Hwaseong FC rises with relentless 'Duri-ball' identity

A bucket of ice water came down over Cha Du-ri's head in the Hwaseong FC locker room on May 31, and the manager stoically stood there and took it. Seconds earlier, he had told his players exactly what would happen to anyone who tried.

"Spray me with water, and you're dead," Cha had warned them. The players poured it on him anyway, and he threw his arms around the youngest of them, bounced up and down and sang along.

Someone shouted, "Manager of the Month, who?" The room answered: "Cha Du-ri!"

He shouted back, "How many [wins] in a row?" The room answered, "Three!"

Hwaseong had just beaten Gyeongnam FC 2-0 for a third straight win and an unbeaten May. The chant was five days premature. The Korea Professional Football League named Cha the K League's Manager of the Month on June 5, the first such award of his coaching career.

Only one of the K League's 25 clubs spent less on running a team last season than Hwaseong FC did. Cha's squad hasn't economized on the pitch, though. They run, press high, take the ball off opponents and break toward the goal in a clatter. Korean football has started calling it "Duri-ball," after the man who was nicknamed "Cha-minator" during his own playing days.

The compliment that carried the most weight came from a rival. Lee Jung-hyo, the Suwon Samsung Bluewings manager and one of the shrewdest tacticians in the K League. 

"[Cha] has built Hwaseong well," Lee said at his post-match press conference at Hwaseong Sports Complex on June 6, after his side had come from behind to beat Hwaseong 2-1 in stoppage time.

Kim Byung-oh, aged 37, is a veteran forward whose game has bloomed under Cha.

"He is effectively a European manager," Kim said. "He passes on the football he experienced over there."

The players look ready to run through a wall for him. What he asks of them has not changed much since 2020, when he coached Osan High School in Seoul, FC Seoul's under-18 side, to an unbeaten K League Junior title. His team talk that year is the clearest statement of his philosophy anyone has on record.

"Enjoy it," he told the teenagers. "Ask when you don't know something. Keep trying the things that aren't working. It's fine to make mistakes now."

While plenty of Korean football stars have moved onto the screen and into YouTube, Cha has stayed on the pitch. He was born into the closest thing Korean football has to royalty, and he was part of the Korea squad that reached the semifinals at the 2002 World Cup. Yet he still climbed the coaching ladder rung by rung: a youth team, a spell on the national team staff, a seat on FIFA's Technical Study Group at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, a coaching license earned in Germany.

Being football legend Cha Bum-kun's son has been a blessing and a curse. During his playing days in Germany, Cha Du-ri once sat for an interview with sensors attached to his body. The readings moved when the conversation turned to his father.

Cha Bum-kun went to West Germany in 1978, when almost no Asian player had made it in Europe. He scored a total of 98 goals in 308 Bundesliga matches for Eintracht Frankfurt and Bayer Leverkusen, winning the UEFA Cup twice, one for each team. 

However, the junior Cha vividly remembers how his father was treated like a traitor after being sacked as Korea's national team manager midway through the 1998 World Cup in France. Cha Du-ri once dreamed of becoming a football reporter, and he studied journalism at Korea University — a move possibly motivated by his father's unpleasant experience with the press at the time.

Cha Du-ri reduced the whole inheritance to a scoreline when he met a reporter in Düsseldorf in 2012, near the end of his playing career.

"If I compare my football life to a match, I'm 5-3 down with 40 minutes gone in the second half," he said. "Ending it in a win would mean beating my father, and that is impossible. If I pour everything I have into making it 5-4, maybe he would still applaud me even though I lost."

Cha Du-ri, the player, lost that match. Cha Du-ri, the manager, could still turn it around and win 6-5.

His father saw only the light. Cha Du-ri knows the dark as well. He has felt the sting of the bench and been relegated himself, and that has made him a big brother his players believe understands them.

BY PARK LIN [[email protected]]