Dalton Stickler - May 18th Blog

One of the coolest parts of this trip has been getting actual interaction with Korean university students, and our day at Sungkyunkwan University was definitely one of my favorite days so far on this trip.

We started with a lecture from Professor Pyun on the current state of the Korean sports industry. As a sports analytics major, I found the revenue comparison slide eye-opening. KBO teams are pulling in roughly $50 million annually, which is less than 10% of what NFL or EPL teams generate. A lot of that gap comes down to broadcast deals and commercial revenue, which are still developing in Korea. One thing I didn’t expect to learn was that KBO teams don’t even own their concessions; the city of Seoul controls the venues and has its own vendor contracts, even regulating what gets sold and at what price. Broadcast revenue is growing fast, though, driven by the expansion of streaming platforms, which honestly mirrors exactly what we’re seeing in the US with Peacock and Prime Video. After the lecture, we split into small groups to talk with the students directly, which was incredibly useful for our projects. Getting real opinions on the Korean sports market from actual Korean sports science students was something no research paper was going to give us.

One thing that genuinely surprised me during those conversations was how little anyone cared about college athletics. I wasn’t expecting the same fandom as in the US, but I also wasn’t expecting them not to care at all about it. Even the sports science majors had zero interest. Coming from a school where college sports are a huge part of campus identity, that was a weird thing to hear.

Lunch in the dining hall was great, way better than Syracuse dining, not a high bar but still. After that, we walked through campus, which is stunning. Samsung sponsors the whole university, and it shows, especially in the library.

Then came my favorite part of the day, the games competition. We split into four teams, green, blue, purple, and red, and went through dodgeball, tug of war, flip the squares, and a relay to finish. Every game was a different version than what I had grown up playing in the States, and the strategy involved made it genuinely competitive. My team, the green team, won the relay to take the overall title, and we each got an LA Dodgers hat as a prize. Not ideal as a Phillies fan, but I’ll take the win.

We had dinner with the students after, and they had been talking some smack about basketball, so a few of us snuck in a pickup game before we had to leave. Playing ball in Seoul with Korean college kids was not on my bingo card for this trip, but that pretty much sums up the whole day, unexpected, and easily one of the best.