In Indonesia and Malaysia, the most-read Korean in football is not a player

Kim Sang-sik’s Wikipedia article was opened 79,001 times in Vietnamese over the past twelve months. In Indonesian, over the same twelve months, 1,542.

He is the Korean manager of the Vietnam national team. The ratio is not a quirk of one name. Shin Tae-yong, who managed Indonesia, runs the other way: 74.7 per million in Indonesian against 9.6 in Vietnamese. Kim Pan-gon, who managed Malaysia, has 100% of his four-country readership in the Malay edition and no article at all in the other three.

Two shapes, measured the same way

Take every Korean footballer and football manager with an article in the Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai or Malay Wikipedia, and scale their reads by the size of each edition. Then ask a second question of each person: what share of their four-country total sits in their single largest country?

Call that concentration. A person read evenly across the region lands near 25%. A person read in one country only lands at 100%.

Both groups lean towards Vietnam, which is why neither sits at 25%. The gap between them is the finding.

The players

Son Heung-min is read in all four. So are Park Ji-sung, Lee Kang-in and Kim Min-jae, at descending scale but the same shape. Note the ordering changes by country: Kim Min-jae is read more than Lee Kang-in in Thailand and less than half as much in Indonesia.

The managers

Kim Sang-sik outscores every Korean footballer except Son Heung-min and Park Ji-sung, on a single country. Shin Tae-yong outscores Lee Kang-in and Kim Min-jae, on a single country. Of the fourteen players in our table, thirteen score below the top manager.

Hong Myung-bo is the exception that shows the rule: he managed Korea, not a Southeast Asian side, and his concentration sits at 51.5% — the players’ shape, not the managers’.

What this does not say

Wikidata records both roles for anyone who played before managing, so it cannot say which role a reader came for. Park Hang-seo played in the 1980s; a Vietnamese reader opening his article in 2026 is almost certainly not there for that. We keep the two groups in separate tables rather than rank a manager against a current player, because the numbers answer different questions.

Reading an article is not following a sport. It counts people looking someone up, usually after a match or an appointment. It cannot say who is liked, and a language edition is a floor on interest in that country, not a measure of it — readers in all four countries also use the English Wikipedia.

The Philippines is absent. The Tagalog Wikipedia is too small to measure with and Filipino readers largely use the English edition, so there is no honest number to publish.

The full table, all fourteen players and twelve managers, is at Four Southeast Asian Wikipedias look up four different Korean athletes.