The Business Behind Tottenham Hotspur’s Pre-Season Korean Tour

It took just minutes for Tottenham Hotspur’s matches in South Korea to sell out.

For their opener against a selection of players from the local K League, traffic around the Seoul World Cup Stadium was gridlocked four hours before kick-off and subway station concourses were blocked with thousands of fans trying to get to the game.

Their 6-3 win against Team K League took place against a sea of plastic as fans in complimentary single-use rain coats braved the monsoon weather last week to watch Harry Kane and Korean superstar Son Heung-min. Some tickets were reportedly put on sale by touts online for upwards of $3,000; the sort of fees usually only seen at a major final.

After two years without a pre-season tour, Premier League sides this summer are the hottest ticket in town, with fans at the airport to meet their heroes and matches selling out quickly despite high ticket prices.

Tickets for Tottenham’s tour of Korea, if bought from the official site, were cheaper than many of the other pre-season tours with the cheapest tickets costing around $30. The cheapest tickets for Liverpool’s match with Manchester United in Bangkok sold out on day one despite costing around $135. Paris Saint-Germain tried to go one step further during their tour of Japan, pricing three premium NFT tickets at over $200,000 (that’s right, two-hundred thousand dollars) each.

When Tottenham’s players arrived in Korea, they were met at the airport by Son Heung-min, who had stayed in the country following his games with the national team last month. Itching to play soccer, he was spotted scoring from the halfway line against a local amateur team and running along the Han River near his hometown of Chuncheon. But even those efforts weren’t enough to survive Antonio Conte’s grueling pre-season sessions, which saw players collapsing after running countless lengths of the pitch in the humid Seoul summer.

Son and Kane both grabbed two goals in Tottenham’s first match — an action-packed win against Team K League. Conte deliberately waited until two minutes into the second half to bring Son on so that he could be cheered onto the pitch by the local fans. Conte also got plenty of cheers, and the light-hearted atmosphere could be seen when the stadium laughed at Team K League midfielder Jun Amano’s perplexed expression after giving away a penalty. Those laughs became cheers moments later when Amano’s free kick caught out Hugo Lloris on his near post.

Spurs’ second game of the tour could’ve been a home game, with fans wearing white shirts and the north stand chanting “Come on you Spurs” and “Glory, glory Tottenham Hotspur.” Their opponents Sevilla though were the team wearing white on the pitch, with Spurs sporting their new away kit. The match, a 1-1 draw, had fewer goals than the Team K League game but certainly more tough tackles. A nice spin on the ball by Son led to Harry Kane’s opener early in the second half before Ivan Rakitic levelled the score for Sevilla with a strike from just outside the penalty area.

As well as their two games in Korea, Spurs’ schedule has been jam-packed with open training sessions, press conferences and media appearances. When asked about the Korean barbeque he shared with his teammates, goalkeeper Hugo Lloris told the local media he enjoyed the dinner as it was a “just a moment to switch off a little bit”.

Players might find overseas pre-season tours tough, but their commercial value is partly what has allowed the Premier League to pay such high salaries and transfer fees to its star players. That money doesn’t just come from selling shirts though. In 2012, a pre-season match in Shanghai helped land Manchester United a world-record sponsorship deal with Chevrolet, who were reportedly blown away by United’s popularity in China.

Any sponsors in Korea at the moment might be feeling the same way about Tottenham. The tour, dubbed the Coupang Play Series, is sponsored by Coupang, a delivery company that is Korea’s answer to Amazon.

Coupang have used the games to boost subscribers to Coupang Play, an on-demand streaming service similar to Amazon Prime. Tickets for the matches could only be bought through the Coupang Play app, which was also the only way to watch the games in Korea, forcing fans to sign-up, at least for a month’s free trial. Tickets went on sale in June, and in that month, Coupang Play saw its highest ever number of monthly active users.

Spurs’ principal sponsor AIA has also been using the tour to make headways into the Korean market, including showcasing an artificial intelligence version of Son Heung-min, known as “AI Sonny” who can share personalized messages with AIA’s Korean customers. AIA have also been using the chance to win tickets to the games as a way to gather customer data, and their game stand outside the stadium in Suwon had a queue snaking around the fan park.

Some tours don’t work out as hoped, especially if the team seem disinterested and manage to offend local fans like Juventus did when they were in South Korea in 2019. But get a tour right and it can pay off big-time.

Sevilla’s stay in Korea was rather more low-key.

On the Friday ahead of their game, skateboarders were enjoying the evening sun outside a quiet Suwon World Cup Stadium which had its gates open as maintenance teams installed temporary barriers ahead of the match on Saturday. Inside, Sevilla manager Julen Lopetegui and former Spurs player Erik Lamela took questions from the media ahead of a relaxed open training session, but many of those questions seemed to be more about Son Heung-min than Sevilla.