World Cup Football 2006: Coaching staffs fight for LG and Samsung in Korea

When it comes to Football, very few nations perhaps can compete with the Koreans. Koreans love football and why not! In World Cup Football 2002, Korean national football team reached the semi final- the best ever performance by any Asian country in World Cup Football. This time too, Team Korea looks formidable and impressive and Korean football fans are expecting with all their heart that their team will again repeat the success of 2002. There can be doubt and debate about this matter but there is no doubt that football craze is now in its all time high in Korea. Well, since 2006 tournament is going to be staged in Germany most Koreans will have to be satisfied with watching the matches in Televisions. So, now the top television companies are in a battle to promote their products and are expecting a huge boom in the next 3 weeks in their sale. You may think- Korea is a rich country and every family has a television set or even more than one sets and so why there can be a boom in TV sales?

Yes, you are right and I thought about it too when I saw the headline, 'Samsung, LG stake TV sales on football coaches' in Korea.net website. Then, I remembered my experience of 2002 tournament. Was there many large screen TV sets? How about LCD monitors, Plasma TV, flat-screen, HDTV? Even large screen TV sets were beyond the capacity of most people in a rich country like Korea 4 years ago as these TV sets were in their early days and naturally they were too expensive. Watching World Cup football matches in ordinary TV sets with small screen is not fun if you can afford the modern ones. When it comes to football, many Koreans can afford a lot more than that. So, LG and Samsung are now trying their best to make the best use of the football craze among the entire Korean population. Dutch manager, Dick Advocaat has been hired by Samsung to promote its flat-screen TV sets. Dick Advocaat got enough money from the company to appear in a busy street "at a busy shopping street near the COEX, southern Seoul, for a special promotion event by Samsung. He was mobbed by hundreds of people rushing to get an autograph or have their picture taken with him." Samsung has also managed to get Guus Hiddink, who was the manager of Korea in 2002 tournament. On the other hand, LG has Hong Myung-bo, one of the three assistant coaches of the Korean team now. Well, you may think that Samsung is ahead in this race as the company has got the current coach and former coach while LG could only manage an assistant coach. Well, not really because Hong Myung-bo was the captain of Korean football team in World Cup 2002 and he is respected like a living legend in Korea. Secondly, LG got the endorsement of another great Korean player Park Ji-sung playing for Manchester United and perhaps the most famous Korean player in Europe.

Because of World Cup football, LG has already seen dramatic improvement in the sale of plasma TVs and in the first 3 months of this year, LG could ship 730,000 plasma sets and this figure is 13% higher than the same period of 2005. On the other hand, Samsung bosses are expecting to have $10 billion from TV sales this year- an all time record for Samsung.