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“An organization that runs baseball, soccer or basketball as a business.” That is how South Korea’s standard dictionary defines gudan, the Korean word for a sports club. The term fits team sports. It does not fit golf, an individual sport.
Yet the word has been used naturally on domestic tours, including the Korea Ladies Professional Golf Association (KLPGA) Tour, for several years. When a company sponsors two or more players at once, it is called a golf gudan. Events billed as inter-team competitions are held from time to time.
Even so, golf is fundamentally a solo pursuit. Unless prize money is awarded to teams, as LIV Golf does, a “club” is hard to call anything more than a marketing frame.
That is what makes the path taken by the Doosan E&C We’ve golf team more striking. The eight players on its KLPGA Tour roster gather during breaks to shoot photo spreads built around concepts that suit each of them, and hold team-building outings at rented country houses. They even turn into singers, recording a team song together. The tools used to run the roster are thorough enough that calling it a club no longer feels awkward.
Lee Yul-lin, who plays for Doosan E&C, said the family-like atmosphere is the team’s greatest strength. “Every time we get together, I draw bright, positive energy from it,” she said.
Doosan E&C set out to build a club in the true sense from the moment it began sponsoring golfers in 2023. It assembled the roster from players who seemed to fit well together, or curiously well together, weighing image, results and potential. It then took “ve” from We’ve, the company’s flagship brand, and assigned each player an English word built on it — live, solve, save. Advertisements were shot to match. The approach resembles the member-by-member branding strategy of a K-pop idol group.
The team song, released recently, was written by a professional composer and recorded in a studio used by classical musicians and pop singers. It was formally released on music streaming platforms. Lee Se-young, a rookie on the roster, said she found herself inside the kind of scene she had watched in behind-the-scenes footage of idol recording sessions, and called it both surreal and fun. Activities outside golf could feel like a burden, but the players’ response seems closer to: when else would we get to try this? Keeping their primary identity as tour players unaffected is presumably part of what running the club requires.
The team song may be used at model homes for presale housing developments or on in-house broadcasts. It is also, of course, a cheering song for golf fans to listen to or sing along with as they think of the team’s players.
Doosan E&C has steadily expanded a culture of supporting the roster as a whole rather than individual players. It named its fan base “We’ver” through an open call to fans, and recently held a pro-am round event for them. More than 3,500 applications came in for 15 spots.
All communication with fans, including entries for such events, runs through the team’s Instagram account. Doosan E&C has no separate corporate Instagram account, yet the golf team’s account is active. The company treats the team as the face of the business.
Other companies that sponsor golfers have since begun launching team Instagram accounts of their own.
Another unusual project is under way on the Doosan E&C golf team’s Instagram account. Fan opinion will be factored into the recruitment of new players at the end of the year. The team plans to collect recommendations through comments over six months, through November, and consult them when it actually signs players.
The response in the comments has been enthusiastic, with long explanations of why a given player should be wearing a Doosan E&C cap. Many of the names, of course, belong to players who cannot be signed because they are still under contract with existing sponsors, or who are not on the regular tour. Still, it is a meaningful attempt in that it captures fan preferences broadly and draws fans into the running of the team.
Oh Se-wook, the general manager of Doosan E&C’s golf team, said the team is always looking for things the players have never done that they can do together. For the team song, using artificial intelligence was discussed at first, but the team decided to rely almost entirely on the players’ own voices, judging that the song was only meaningful if each of them sang their own part naturally.
Oh, a former coach of the national women’s golf team at the Asian Games who also serves as a public relations executive at Doosan E&C, said he has long hoped to shift the perception that a golfer only needs to hit the ball well.
“As long as the company sponsors players and runs a team, it makes sense to make active use of them in promotion,” he said. “And that also becomes a springboard for the players to grow into stars. We are trying a lot of unconventional things, and above all I am simply grateful that the players are cooperative. We intend to keep pushing ahead with a fandom-centered approach to running the team.”
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Original reporting by Yang Jun-ho for Seoul Economic Daily.
AI-translated from Korean. Quotes from foreignxact original wording
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