The Deliberate and the Unintentional Mechanisms of (Sports) Heritage: Understanding the Successful Heritagization of the 2002 World Cup in South Korea

The sensational sporting achievement of South Korea’s national team in the 2002 World Cup, together with the powerful demonstration of nationalist support by millions in the streets throughout the tournament, rendered the event worthy of remembrance and preservation. Yet a successful heritagization cannot be explained merely on the basis of an event’s remarkability. This paper unpacks the heritagization process of the 2002 World Cup, while acknowledging anxieties and hopes that inspired the process. I identify a mainly three-layered process: framing the event as a memory in public discourse, tangible and intangible commemoration, and inclusion in the education system. Accordingly, I argue that the heritagization of the event owes its success to the merger between frequent, spontaneous references, and deliberate initiatives. The paper makes three contributions: first, covering two decades, the encompassing overview illuminates how sports has been utilized to shape collective memory in contemporary South Korea; second, it contributes a case study to the growing body of literature on sports heritage; finally, it offers a theoretical intervention into the scholarship of (sports) heritage by highlighting how, sometimes, heritage is formed through the dynamics of both intentional initiatives and unintentional expressions, thus addressing a relatively neglected understanding of the heritage process.