The relocation of professional basketball team KCC has brought an end to its 22-year association with Jeonju, Jeonbuk.
With the professional basketball team packing up after the baseball team, Jeonbuk is now left with only the Hyundai Football Club as a professional sports team.
The conflict over the Jeonju Indoor Gymnasium, which KCC has been using as its home stadium, is the ostensible reason for the move, but there are also speculations that the company’s marketing aspect was taken into account.
The rumors of KCC’s relocation, which surfaced a couple of times during Mayor Kim Seung-soo’s tenure, suddenly surfaced again in the middle of this month.
It was reported that the city of Jeonju had asked KCC to vacate the Jeonju Indoor Gymnasium, which it uses as its home stadium.
The city reportedly made the request because Chonbuk National University, which owns the gymnasium site, has decided to demolish the gymnasium by 2025 to build the Campus Innovation Park, a national project.
However, the new gymnasium promised by Jeonju was not scheduled to be completed until 2026 at the earliest.
For KCC, the team would have to live without a home stadium for at least a year. The professional basketball world criticized the move as ‘impossible’ and ‘disrespectful’.
In particular, the new home stadium is a project that Jeonju has been actively promoting since 2016 to prevent KCC from relocating.
However, the construction of the new home stadium was delayed and only ordered earlier this month after seven years.
If various administrative procedures were delayed, completion in 2026 was not guaranteed.
Suddenly, some media outlets reported that KCC was considering moving its venue, and on the morning of the 30th, the KBL held a board meeting and suddenly approved the change of venue.
The city of Jeonju later said, “We decided to postpone the demolition of the gymnasium until after the new home stadium is built. We will complete the new home stadium without delay by 2026,” but KCC’s mind was made up.
There are analysts who believe that KCC’s decision to relocate may have had more to do with marketing than just these surface reasons.
The actual use of the home stadium was not a problem for the time being.
This is because the city of Jeonju has postponed the demolition of the gymnasium until 2026 and promised that the new stadium will be completed by 2026.
However, the rumors of KCC’s relocation became a reality less than a month later.
As a result, people in Jeonju and elsewhere are saying, “It was like a slap in the face when we wanted to cry.”
The interpretation is that the KCC wanted to relocate to a big city with great marketing effects and took advantage of the demolition of the gymnasium when the issue arose.
In terms of crowd mobilization, Jeonju is at a disadvantage compared to big cities.
A similar interpretation was made by some when KCC seriously considered relocating in 2016.
At the time, the aging facilities of the Jeonju Indoor Gymnasium, built in 1973, were cited as reasons for the move, as well as the lack of space and poor player waiting rooms.
However, Jeonju promised to resolve the home stadium issue, and KCC decided to stay in the city under the pressure of fan backlash, so the relocation theory sank below the surface for a 스포츠토토링크 while.
