User:Countdown to 10 million viewers...1.41 million 'Bitgoeul' Gwangju, 72% of population went to see KIA
Seventy-two percent of the local population went to see a club.
Population 1,412,986. As of July this year, it is the number of people in Gwangju Metropolitan City, South Jeolla Province. In the meantime, as of the 3rd, 1026,235 cumulative spectators, a new single-season record for the KIA team, visited Gwangju-Kia Champions Field. In short, it is not an exaggeration to say that 72% of Gwangju's population visited the ballpark.
Of course, 72 percent is not an accurate figure. As Kia is a "popular baseball club nationwide," it gathers at the Champions Field from all over the country, including Seoul. On the train from Seoul to Gwangju, you can see countless baseball fans wearing KIA uniforms. On top of that, since people who visit the stadium several times are counted as different masters, it is estimated that about 40 percent of the population living in Gwangju actually visited the stadium.
Nevertheless, the figure is quite a figure. According to taxi drivers who greet them in Jeolla dialect, "Do you go to see the Kia Tigers" whenever they take a taxi from a train station to Champions Field, they take customers to the stadium more than six times a day.
The countdown to the 10 million mark has begun in the Korean professional baseball league. The KBO league has surpassed 9,671,340 spectators so far on Tuesday. With only 69 games to go, even if 10,000 spectators are added per game, the number easily exceeds 1 million. According to a survey conducted by the Korea Baseball Organization on April 28, the average number of spectators per game this season is 14,756, which is a fact that the number of spectators who have exceeded 10 million since the establishment of the Korean pro baseball league in 1982.
As the number of spectators has exceeded the number of spectators ever, new records for the largest number of spectators at each stadium are also coming out one after another. On the 3rd, Kia-Champions Field in Gwangju, the home of KIA, set a new record with a cumulative attendance of 1026,235 this year, and KT also set a new record for the largest number of spectators (697,350) in a single season on the 7th.
Whenever KIA plays in the Seoul metropolitan area, away seats at the stadium are filled with KIA fans. It is no coincidence that the KBO league sets a new record for the largest number of spectators in a single season every year when KIA wins the championship. It was like that in 2009 when KIA won the championship and that in 2017. And Kia, which ranks first in the league this season, has a magic number of only six.
