‘Leeds Days’: Understanding a Korean Cultural Phenomenon Started by Alan Smith

It’s hard to know where to start. But explaining to your wife that you’ve been looking for middle-aged South Korean women on social media for an article about Leeds United is as good a place as any.

If you’re wondering where the hell this is going, it’s a really crazy story involving ex-Leeds and Manchester United striker Alan Smith and his former team-mate Park Ji-sung, and it also considers everything from the hairline in retirement of Prince William. to a young Keira Knightley.

Confused?

Wait until you learn that tens of millions of people in South Korea go about their daily lives using the phrase “Leeds Days” to describe their heyday.

As crazy as it sounds, those two words – “Leeds Days” – are ingrained in the Korean language, on Instagram and YouTube, and referenced by people who, in the vast majority of cases, have no interest in football, with much less knowledge of a Yorkshire-based club on the other side of the world, or the blond-haired English striker who is inadvertently responsible for the phrase.

Needless to say, where it went wrong for Daniel Farke and his players in the recent Championship play-off final against Southampton is not part of the conversation here.

Sungmo Lee, a soccer reporter from South Korea, smiles. “In Korea, ‘Leeds Days’ means in your prime, your prime,” he says.

“It came from Leeds player Alan Smith. He was very good at Leeds but not so good at Manchester United, so since then people have started using that expression. And now it is also used in other areas. Even people who don’t know anything about Leeds know that expression.”

Alan Smith during Leeds (Alex Livesey/ALLSPORT)

Indeed, as a week spent in South Korea proved.

“It means your best days,” confirmed the smiling receptionist at the Koreana Hotel in Seoul, between mentioning that breakfast must be booked a day in advance and looking totally puzzled at the mention of Smith’s favorite Mark Viduka. strike partner

Lee Dong-hyun, who is an academy researcher for K-League club Incheon, knows a lot more about the context of the phrase and laughed when “Leeds Days” was brought up at the end of our interview about youth football in South Korea.

“Everybody knows,” says Lee. “Most of them don’t know about Leeds United. But it has become a common saying in Korea.

“For example, when someone remembers when they were younger, like a teenager, or in their twenties, they say, ‘That’s my Leeds days.’ But the expression has now spread to other generations.”

Apparently there is even a TV show in South Korea (over 75 episodes) called “Leeds Era Once Again”. According to the show’s introduction, the program provides a platform for people to tell their stories “to help them achieve a new golden period of their lives”.

Of course, “Leeds Days” is now also in the dictionary in Korea. The entry reads: ‘A similar meaning to ‘golden age’, etc. It is used to represent the past when it was bright.”

There is a reference to Alan Smith’s role in all of this as well.

At first glance, Smith’s involvement is curious. After all, there were much bigger names in English football in the early 2000s.

However, Smith happened to be playing for Manchester United in 2005 when Park Ji-sung, the most famous South Korean footballer at the time, moved to Old Trafford, prompting a huge surge in interest in the Far Eastern club.

Smith and Park Ji-sung, right, were teammates at Manchester United (John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)

It was also an era when online football communities were taking off in South Korea, and this is where Smith’s performances for United (he struggled to make much of an impression, scoring just 12 goals in 93 appearances and suffered an injury terrible at Anfield) a talking point.

Those in South Korea more familiar with Smith’s backstory – the striker had been a cult figure at Elland Road and a thorn in the side of Premier League defenders with his combative, action-packed style – consistently referred to ” leeds days’ on the internet. forums, essentially to explain how good he used to be and which ended up planting the seed of a catchphrase that soon transcended football.

When The one from Athletic Charlie Eccleshare discussed this topic on the Football Cliches podcast two years ago after returning from Tottenham Hotspur’s pre-season tour of South Korea, some of the responses on social media made for interesting reading.

“Those were the days of Leeds.”@CDEccleshare say @FootballCliches and @D_C_W on how ‘Leeds Days’ amazingly became a household phrase in South Korea thanks to Park Ji-Sung and Alan Smith…

🎙️ FOOTBALL CLICHES pic.twitter.com/Z6biSXRCjF

— Athletic | Football (@TheAthleticFC) July 27, 2022

“I went and looked it up,” Ben Davies (not the Spurs defender) posted on Twitter. “It seems that Korean Instagram is full of middle-aged women posting photos of themselves when they were 18 with ‘Leeds Days’ hashtags.”

Well, there is no “apparent” about it.

After being a little disappointed with the initial search results, recruiting a translator proved to be a game-changer. Park In-wook, who spent a week transporting me around South Korea (in search of Jesse Lingard rather than middle-aged women on Instagram), pointed out a key flaw in the search term.

“Leeds Days,” Park In-wook explained, should be written in Korean.

“Lijeu Sijeol,” he said, spelling it out letter by letter.

He was laughing when he looked over and saw the updated results. “It will take you a while to look through them!”

There were 108,000 posts from anyone and everyone, including movie stars (Keira Knightley, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio), footballers (Brazil’s Ronaldo), royals (Prince William) and, yes, middle-aged Korean women. South also, all photographed now and in bloom. Or, to borrow the correct term from South Korea, in the “Leeds Days”.

Park In-wook shakes his head. “Somehow on the Internet that (phrase) became commonly used,” he adds.

“And you usually used it in terms of a person’s appearance—when you were beautiful and young and having a great time.

“Someone might say, ‘Oh, your look is ‘Lijeu Sijeol!’ — “Leeds Age.” That means you look really good right now. Or something is “Lijeu Sijeol”.

It’s unclear how successful it could be as a conversational line. But what we can say is that “Leeds Days” is pretty ubiquitous in South Korea. A YouTube channel is dedicated to the phenomenon and has wildly popular videos that routinely attract hundreds of thousands of views, or millions in the case of Ahn Jung-hwan.

Hailed a national hero after scoring the goal that knocked Italy out of the 2002 World Cup, Ahn was also a spectator in South Korea due to his model-like looks. Unfortunately, age has caught up with Ahn, as it has with all of us, meaning that the “Leeds Days” were more than 20 years ago.

Ahn Jung-hwan scores against Italy at the 2002 World Cup (Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images)

Park In-wook smiles. “Obviously the older generations have no idea what this expression means. But a lot of people who don’t even watch football, I know.”

Presumably, though, they won’t know the origin?

“No,” Park In-wook replies with a laugh. “They wouldn’t have a clue about ‘Leeds’ – it’s just a foreign word to them.”

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)