In a world of identikit prefabricated stadia, where clubs’ identities are often sold to make room for sponsorship opportunities and conference centres, there is a certain romance in grounds that are a bit different.
Who can forget Braga’s Estadio Municipal, its rockface behind the goal more memorable than any of the games it hosted in Euro 2004? Or the nine arches of AS Monaco’s Stade Louis II, which offer a glimpse of the Mediterranean to add to the glamour of a Champions League match? Even something as simple as a statue of the King of Pop can make a ground stand out, if not always for the right reasons.
There are plenty of exotic grounds around the world, from a floating stadium in Singapore to a runway behind the goal in Gibraltar. This season has given us a new contender for the world’s strangest football stadium: the Alpensia Ski Jump Stadium in South Korea.
Nestled high in the Taebaek Mountains that run down the east coast of South Korea, the Alpensia Ski Jump stadium was built for the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. Conveniently, the landing area for the ski jumpers happens to be around the same dimensions as a football pitch. Local officials put two and two together and decided that, with Korea’s football season running from March to late November and Korea’s skiing season running from November to March, the 11,000-seater stadium could serve both purposes.
So, while the stand at one end of the pitch holds diehard drum-and-flag-wielding home supporters, the other end is overshadowed by two huge ski jumps, the bases of which reach the edge of the turf just behind the goal, acting like a giant playground slide, or perhaps a convenient ball retrieval system for the stray long-range shots that are common in Korean football.
Since their formation in 2008, Gangwon FC have been forced to lead a nomadic existence. The 1.5m people living in Gangwon are spread thinly around the mountainous province and as none of its cities are large enough to support a top-flight side on their own, the team play some games in the east coast cities of Sokcho and Gangneung, and some in the central cities of Chuncheon and Wonju.
They added a fifth venue to their portfolio last summer, when they played a few games at the Alpensia Ski Jump Stadium, in what seemed to be a one-off at the time. By the end of the season, they had returned to their usual home pitch in coastal Gangneung.
Gangwon finally earned promotion back to the top flight last season after spending several years in the wilderness of Korea’s second tier. This led to a winter spending spree as the club brought in several well-known domestic players, including striker Lee Keun-ho, who scored for South Korea against Russia in the 2014 World Cup. Their winter acquisitions suggest they could be high up in the table come the end of the season but the only certainty is that they will be high up in the mountains for their home games.
Playing in a stadium with ski jumps has some novelty value at first – and it has made the club stand out – but it has its drawbacks. Not least the fact that, like most ski resorts, Alpensia is in the middle of nowhere. Pyeongchang County, where the resort is located, has fewer than 50,000 residents and most of them live on the far side of the county from the resort.
Visiting fans who don’t wish to drive or take the official supporters’ coach have no other option but to take a bus to the ski resort on the other side of the mountain. They might find one or two restaurants there, but not much else. The fans who are willing to make the arduous trek to the stadium are rewarded by being charged the highest ticket prices in Korea.
Even so, more than 5,000 fans made the trip halfway up the mountain for Gangwon’s first home game of the season. The end opposite the ski jumps was packed with Gangwon supporters in orange shirts and scarves. Some fans even dressed up in bright orange pigtails and enjoyed the party atmosphere as their team hosted champions FC Seoul.
Unfortunately, the match itself was a scrappy and disappointing affair. Although FC Seoul’s football this season has been far from freeflowing, the main reason why this particular game was lacking in quality was the appalling state of the pitch. Just 23 days before Montenegrin striker Dejan Damjanović scored the only goal of the game for FC Seoul, Polish skijumper Maciej Kot was flying through the air to record jumps of 108.5m and 110.5m in the FIS Ski Jumping World Cup.
Between these two sporting events, huge amounts of snow and ice had to be cleared from the pitch, some of which was piled up in a dull grey heap at the base of the ski jump ramps behind the goal. The turf then had to be quickly laid and was in such a poor condition at the time of Gangwon’s first game that it more closely resembled a sandpit than a football pitch. With fans having to travel halfway up a mountain and fork out more than usual on tickets and transport only to watch a game played on an appalling surface, it won’t be long before the thrill of playing at a pitch with ski jumps behind the goal starts to wear off.
The bureaucrats who dreamed the move will no doubt be commended for their out-of-the-box thinking and for their ability to find a use for the ski jumping arena in the off-season, but Gangwon FC already have four other perfectly functional stadiums. There probably isn’t another club on the planet with more home grounds than Gangwon and yet, rather than using any one of their four other grounds – all of which are located in places where people actually live – officials chose the least convenient option for every single fan of the club. Talk about ignoring your supporters.
With the huge amounts of money spent on hosting the Olympics, the word “legacy” is often mentioned as a way of justifying the vast splashing of cash that could be used on healthcare or education rather than a giant corporate party. Brazilians were quite right to protest their government’s questionable Olympic spending and, just like with the Olympic Stadium in London, officials in Korea want to show that the money they are spending has some kind of long-term benefit.
In London’s case, a lack of plans for the future of the stadium led to money from the public purse being spent to make the venue suitable for football before West Ham could move in. In Gangwon’s case, fans are being asked to spend their own time and money to give the stadium a purpose when there isn’t any snow around. They are being asked to paint a white elephant grey, but wouldn’t it be better if people stopped building white elephants in the first place?
This is not the first time football fans in Korea have been inconvenienced to give a purpose to a useless stadium in the countryside. In 2011, despite seeing all of the other huge, empty and unprofitable stadiums around Korea, the city of Hwaseong, about an hour south of Seoul, built a $175m, 35,000-seater stadium that looks like an alien spaceship plonked in the middle of a field. The city’s local football team play in the Korean fourth tier and are lucky if a hundred people attend their matches.
Not to be outdone, the neighbouring city of Yongin built a similar showpiece stadium. Neither stadium serves any local purpose. The only way that the football association can find a use for them is to force the national team to play some games there every now and then, forcing supporters to trek out to these monstrosities to watch their country take on Laos or Lebanon.
While the legacy of the Olympics is a pain for local football fans, at least fans of Gangwon FC have a nice backdrop of mountains and forests to look at. It doesn’t make up for the poor football on the pitch, but at least it’s something.
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