Vietnam looks up a different Korea than its neighbours do

In the Vietnamese Wikipedia, the most-read Korean athlete of the past twelve months is not a footballer. It is Faker, the League of Legends player, at 250 reads per million reads of the whole edition. Son Heung-min, second, is at 145.

Move one country over and that ordering does not survive. In the Indonesian edition, esports accounts for 0.2% of all reads of Korean athletes. In Thailand, 4.8%. In Malaysia, 2.2%. In Vietnam, 60.6%.

That is the finding. Not that Korean athletes are read in Southeast Asia — they are — but that the four countries do not read the same ones, and one of them reads a different sport altogether.

What was counted

We took every person on Wikidata with South Korean citizenship listed as a footballer, esports player, baseball player, golfer or mixed martial artist: 8,917 people. Of those, 926 have an article in at least one of the Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai or Malay Wikipedias and could be measured over the twelve months to July 2026.

Raw read counts would only measure the encyclopaedias. The Indonesian edition draws 838 million reads in that window; the Malay edition draws 163 million. So every number here is reads per million reads of that edition, which is what makes the four comparable at all.

The third column is worth a second look. The Vietnamese Wikipedia has written articles on 644 Korean athletes; the Thai Wikipedia has 65. Thailand still reads Son Heung-min at 105 per million, above Indonesia’s 81. A small shelf, read hard.

One name is in all four

Son Heung-min is the only Korean athlete near the top of every column: 81 per million in Indonesian, 145 in Vietnamese, 105 in Thai, 12 in Malay. Nobody else does that. Park Ji-sung, retired since 2014, is second in three of the four — 21, 18 and 6 — which says more about when English football arrived in these markets than about the current squad.

Below those two the lists stop agreeing. Lee Kang-in is third in Indonesian and outside the top six in Thai and Malay. In the Vietnamese top eight, five names are esports players; in the other three editions, none are above fourth.

The managers are read where they manage

Wikidata records both roles for anyone who played before managing, so it cannot say which role a reader came for. We put them in their own table rather than rank a national-team manager against a player. The pattern in that table is the sharpest in the data.

Each is read in the country whose national team he took, and at a rate one to two orders of magnitude below that everywhere else. Kim Sang-sik is read seventy-three times more often in Vietnamese than in Indonesian. Shin Tae-yong, who managed Indonesia, runs the other way.

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

What this cannot say

Reading an encyclopaedia article is not following a sport. This counts people looking someone up — after a match, after a transfer, after a name appears in a headline. It cannot say who is liked.

Readers in Southeast Asia also use the English Wikipedia, which is 82 billion reads in this window and cannot be split by country. So every number here is a floor on interest, not a measure of it.

Of the 8,917 Korean athletes on Wikidata, 7,967 have no article in any of these four editions. That is an absence of an article, not an absence of interest, and it is not counted as a zero. A further 24 could not be measured and are left out rather than counted as zero.

The Philippines is missing from this piece. The Tagalog Wikipedia draws 1.9 million reads a month, less than a single popular article draws elsewhere, and Filipino readers largely use the English edition. There is no honest Philippines number to publish here, so there is none.

The full table, all four editions, is at Four Southeast Asian Wikipedias look up four different Korean athletes.