Ji So-yeon: "Female Soccer Players Don't Ask for a Lot of Money They Want the Environment"

Ji So-yeon: "Female Soccer Players Don't Ask for a Lot of Money They Want the Environment"

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Ji So-yeon (Seattle Reign), co-chair of the Korea Professional Football Players Association (KPFA), emphasized that what female players want is not a high salary, but a league environment with basic conditions.

Ji So-yeon met with reporters ahead of the 2024 WK League awards ceremony hosted by the Players' Association at The Riverside Hotel in Seocho-gu, Seoul on the 14th and said, "Our players are not asking for a lot of money. They are asking for us to keep up with the changing times."

He emphasized, "The WK League was launched in 2009, and the highest annual salary has remained the same at 50 million won for 10 years," and "the players' motivation has decreased, and parents who want to send their daughters to soccer will instead switch to volleyball, basketball, or golf with this salary."

Since single-year contracts are common in the WK League, the actual upper limit is 65 million won, considering that the contract fee can be reduced by up to 30% of the existing 50 million won. Sometimes, there are cases of salaries in the hundreds of millions, with incentives such as winning bonuses added.

However, the proportion of players who enjoy such ‘high salaries’ is not large.

The WK League, the top level of Korean women's soccer, has a set salary for each stage of the rookie draft. The first round draftee receives 30 million won, and the fourth round draftee receives 20 million won.

Of the 23 players selected in the draft late last year, more than half, 파워볼 14, were selected in the 4th round or lower with an annual salary of 20 million won.

Ji So-yeon, who had also appealed to Yonhap News on the 11th to provide basic facilities such as a changing room, admitted that her "resolve statement" could be heard as a simple complaint from some athletes in unpopular sports.

Ji So-yeon said, "But when I played in the US and UK, these kinds of complaints were natural conditions that had to be met," and voiced that the WK League's match times and management methods need to be further improved.

The items that Ji So-yeon mentioned as 'basic conditions' included attracting sponsors, TV broadcasting, and assigning matches to prime time slots.