EAPSI Korea 2010: World Cup: South Korea vs. Nigeria

Even before leaving for Korea, I knew football (soccer) was huge here. Especially in Seoul, the capital, where people go out into the streets and watch the game on huge projection screens. These are two pictures I had seen of the celebrations in Seoul for football matches:

So of course when we found out that we would be in Seoul for the last group match, we had to go out and watch the game with a bunch of Koreans.

We find out that there are actually several places in Seoul to watch the game. At least 4 entire streets were shut down so we just headed to the one closest to our hotel. The game started at 3:30am but that didn't seem to deter anybody from coming out. We arrive to scenes like these:

And this was just one of the streets that was blocked off. The team and fans call themselves the red devils. Thats why you'll see people wearing red horns that light up.

Singing the national anthem (left) and after scoring the first goal (right):

We made some new friends:

Korea scores again to make it a tied game at 2:2 (left), at 5am its bright enough outside that they turn off the street lights (right):

Watching the final minutes of the game (left). As long as the match ends in a draw, Korea will advance past the group stage. The celebration after the final whistle is blown (right):

To get an idea of what the atmosphere was like, watch this video. In the US we like to think that the SuperBowl is the biggest sporting event in the world. The last SuperBowl had around 100 million viewers. During the 2006 World Cup, the average viewers per game was 93 million. So the World Cup is the equivalent of an entire month of SuperBowls being played back to back.

As soon as the game is over, people immediately start picking up trash and putting it in piles to make the cleanup easier.