FC Seoul manager Kim Gi-dong celebrates in front of the club's supporters after a 5-0 win over Gwangju FC at Seoul World Cup Stadium in Mapo District, western Seoul, on March 22.NEWS1
FC Seoul is 16 points clear at the top of K League 1 and closing on its first championship in a decade without a single star carrying the club.
Manager Kim Gi-dong has built the league's most prolific attack and its meanest defense around one basic rule: The team comes before any player in it.
Seoul was for years defined by the opposite. Striker Park Chu-young, winger Lee Chung-yong and midfielder Ki Sung-yueng all became the face of the club in turn. Most recently, the list ran to Jesse Lingard, the midfielder who arrived from Manchester United. The names on the team sheet were reliably bigger than the team itself.
However, today's version of the club looks nothing like that. Through 26 matches Seoul has 17 wins, five draws and four losses for 56 points, 16 ahead of second-place Ulsan HD. It has scored a league-high 52 goals and conceded a league-low 21. A first title since 2016 is close enough to touch.
Alex Ferguson is the obvious comparison. At Manchester United he was willing to move on from David Beckham and Roy Keane rather than let a dressing room revolve around either, on the principle that no player is bigger than the club.
Kim's refusal to bend to hierarchy started much earlier, and it cost him the game once. He took up football in his first year of middle school and quit six months later because he did not want to train in a culture where older players hit younger ones. He came back in his third year only after joining a newly founded team that had no seniors, and therefore none of the beatings that had driven him out.
FC Seoul manager Kim Gi-dong gives a thumbs-up after a 5-0 win over Gwangju FC at Seoul World Cup Stadium in Mapo District, western Seoul, on March 22.NEWS1
He picked another new program in high school and wore the captain's armband for four straight years, from his last year of middle school to his last year of high school. Those years taught him to persuade a group rather than punish it. He brought the same principle to Seoul when he took over ahead of the 2024 season.
“Everyone wants to score. Who enjoys the thankless work on defense?” Kim said. “But sacrifice is the heart of a rebuild. You need players who get to where the team needs them before anyone asks.”
Ki and Lingard both left last year, and some supporters complained that the club had lost its identity. The table has since made Kim's case for him.
No single scorer carries this team. Striker Patryk Klimala has 10 goals and one assist, winger Jeong Seung-won has eight and five and Lee Seung-mo has six and two. Winger Song Min-kyu added five and four before his move to Portugal. Fourteen Seoul players have scored this season, and the team has put 17 goals past opponents in its last four matches. The nicknames that have followed all play on the Kim's first name, Gi-dong, which doubles as the Korean term for a rapid-response strike unit.
“In the past, a few stars defined what Seoul was,” Kim said. “Now every player is building a new team culture together.”
FC Seoul supporters unfurl a banner reading “toward that seventh star” during a match against Gwangju FC at Seoul World Cup Stadium in Mapo District, western Seoul, on March 22.NEWS1
Kim has no tolerance for violence, but enormous patience for talking. A player left out of the matchday squad often gets taken to a meal, where Kim explains his thinking and asks for understanding. A player he considers lazy gets more chances to find the answer on the training pitch. A player who damages the team's chemistry gets fewer.
“Then you just have to let them go,” Kim said of the second kind. There is still a blade behind the friendly smile.
He also knows when to light a fire. Seoul faced Gwangju FC on Aug. 30, days after Song completed a move to the Primeira Liga club Nacional, and Kim spoke to his players before kickoff.
“We got to first place through the strength of everyone on this squad,” he said. “Let's not lose today and give people a reason to say it was because Song Min-kyu was gone.”
Seoul won 5-2.
Kim is in the final year of his contract and is refusing to get carried away.
“This run could be over in three days or it could last 10 years,” he said. “What really matters is next season and the one after.”
In golf, Kim plays with a 2 handicap. However, he did not pick up a club in his first months on the job.
“I was too self-conscious to hold one when I first arrived,” he said. He now gets out on the links with his players often enough that it has become part of how the squad holds together.
Once, FC Seoul built around stars. Without a big name on the pitch, they struggled, and conventional wisdom was that they needed another star player to break out of mediocrity.
However, the star Seoul was missing instead turned out to be on the sideline.
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.
