‘Player as a Job’, Beyond Elitism: A Critical Look at the History of Professional Athlete Development in South Korea

For years, South Korean sport has been driven by a state-led, elite-focused approach that prioritises national prestige. However, recent demographic shifts and changing public sentiment towards the traditional elite sports system are gradually eroding the foundations of professional athlete development. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the structural problems of the professional athlete development system that led to the crisis in Korean sport, by re-examining it through a literature review focusing on 265 academic papers and reports. The derived results are as follows: First, while the student-athlete system has been the foundation for the development of professional sports in Korea, it has also created an abnormal structure where student-athletes can advance to higher education and succeed as athletes even if they do not uphold their duties as students. This ultimately leads to Korean athletes having ‘athlete as their only profession’. Second, school athletic clubs and dormitory systems, either voluntarily or involuntarily, created a military-style island culture of strict hierarchy. There, they abandoned their lives as students and became solely focused on victory (performance). Third, this school athletic club culture extended to the Taereung National Training Center, a national-level dormitory. Athletes who became national representatives were subjected to a strict hierarchy and apprenticeship-style training, being driven into a blind spot for human rights for the sake of national prestige and victory, and even showed compliance with such human rights abuses. As such, the professional athlete development system in Korea has been solely focused on victory and performance, pushing student-athletes into a human rights blind spot, and has resulted in being regarded as something that needs to be eradicated from Korean society today.