As Son Heung-Min Puts LAFC On Korean Radio, Here’s How TV Could Follow

Son Heung-Min, right, of celebrates after scoring the opening goal for LAFC against FC Dallas on Aug. 23.

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Los Angeles Football Club fell to a 2-1 defeat to Western Conference-leading San Diego FC in Son Heung-Min’s home debut on Satuday night.

Even so, the Korean star helped the Black-and-Gold make some MLS history with what appears to be the first long-team local radio broadcast agreement between an MLS team and a Korean-language local station in at least two decades.

Earlier this week, the club announced the pact with KYPA 1230 AM to broadcast all of LAFC’s remaining matches during the 2025 season, beginning with Saturday’s clash against the local Southern California rival.

The agreement is thought to be the first of its kind at least since another famous Korean footballer, Hong Myung-bo, played across town for the LA Galaxy in 2003 and 2004. (Hong is know Son’s manager on the South Korea national team.) And it’s another sign of Son’s enormous local marketing potential in a region thought to have the world’s largest South Korean community outside the nation’s borders.

KYPA is one of four Korean-language local radio broadcasters serving an estimated population of 320,000 with significant Korean lineage and a region with a history Korean athletes playing their trade at local sports teams. The latter dates way back to 1994, when when pitcher Chan Ho Park signed with baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers and became MLB’s first Korean-born player.

That local Korean sports heritage provided a viral broadcasting moment as recently as this May, when most-recent Korean Dodgers signing Kim Hye-seong hit his first Major League home run.

Dodgers local TV broadcasts are currently simulcast in Korean via the SAP function on local rights holder SportsNet LA. Broadcaster SPOTV holds all MLB broadcast rights for viewers watching from South Korea.

LAFC On TV In Korean Could Take Multiple Shapes

While the new radio deal brings local exposure, a solution that allows Korean viewers locally and in South Korea to watch the enormously popular Son in their native language represents the next challenge in capitalizing on his enormous following.

The club and the league would underestimate that demand at their peril: Son has been named South Korea’s most popular athlete for eight consecutive years according to one outlet, and remains a fixture on a national team that has already qualified for the 2026 World Cup.

Apple TV and its MLS streaming service, MLS Season Pass, are available in South Korea, but most games are currently only broadcast in English and Spanish. As of press time, the league was not able to provide any details about efforts to make games available on TV in Korean, but theoretically there are couple avenues it could explore.

One is to simply make the local radio broadcast from 1230 AM available via the streaming service. Subscribers already have this option with most English-language locally produced radio broadcasts and a few Spanish-language local feeds as well.

Another is to hire Korean broadcasters internally for LAFC games and potentially other games of note. This is the approach now taken by MLS Season Pass with regards to games in French, which are still available through the service for all three Canadian teams, but no longer leaguewide as they were when the league’s 10-year pact with Apple TV first began.

A third option would be to sell a smaller simulcast package of matches to a broadcaster in Korea to be shown only domestically. The league already has two such relationships, with Fox Sports in the United States and TSN/RDS in Canada. Those two agreements cover about 75 matches of the league’s 510-match regular season schedule and select playoff matches, including the MLS Cup final.