(Lee Kil-sung, atticus@chosun.com )
With the national soccer players' popularity skyrocketing, some 30 fan club websites a day are being established on the Internet, some of which have already surpassed that of entertainment stars with regard to membership.
The largest domestic Internet community hosted by Daum, for example, saw some 1,500 new fan club sites since May 31, the opening of the World Cup.
On the day after the Korean match against America, some 60 fan clubs were created in a day, breaking the record at the time of the Salt Lake Winter Olympics with 50 new sites regarding speed skater Kim Dong-sung.
Of the fan clubs for all of the 23 national soccer players, midfielder Kim Nam-il, nicknamed the "vacuum cleaner," is top in popularity.
The biggest fan club for Kim has some 210,000 members, surpassing Jang Na-ra's fan club, the biggest for an entertainment star with some 130,000. In addition there are 600 so-called mini-clubs with several hundreds or thousands of members.
Fan clubs for captain Hong Myung-bo and striker Ahn Jung-hwan are also large with some 60,000 members each.
The number of mini fan clubs for Ahn Jung-hwan and Park Ji-sung comes next with some respective 400 clubs after Kim Nam-il.
The core of these fan clubs are mainly teenage girls and women in their 20s, but soccer fans in their 40s and 50s also take around 1% of the total.
Exceptionally some 300 fan clubs for head coach Guus Hiddink have majority of male fans.
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