"Oh, your looks are ‘Lijeu Sijeol!’ – ‘Leeds Days!’" (2024)

It’s hard to know where to start. But explaining to your wife that you’ve been looking up middle-aged women from South Korea on social media, for an article about Leeds United, feels like as good a place as any.

If you’re wondering where on earth this is going, it’s a truly bonkers story that involves the ex-Leeds and Manchester United forward Alan Smith and his former team-mate Park Ji-sung, and also takes in everything from Prince William’s receding hairline to a youthful Keira Knightley.

Confused?

Wait until you find out that tens of millions of people in South Korea go about their daily lives using the expression “Leeds Days” to describe their heyday.

As crazy as it sounds, those two words — “Leeds Days” — are ingrained in the Korean language, all over Instagram and YouTube, and referenced by people who in the vast majority of cases have no interest in football, let alone any knowledge of a club based in Yorkshire, on the other side of the world, or the blond-haired English striker who is inadvertently responsible for the phrase.

Needless to say, where it went wrong for Daniel Farke and his players in the recent Championship play-off final against Southampton isn’t part of the conversation here.

Sungmo Lee, a football reporter from South Korea, smiles. “In Korea, ‘Leeds Days’ means in your prime, the best ever time,” he says.

“It came from the player from Leeds, Alan Smith. He was very good at Leeds but he was not that good at Manchester United, so from that time people started to use that expression. And now it’s used in other areas as well. Even people who don’t know anything about Leeds, they know this expression.”

They do indeed, as a week spent in South Korea proved.

“It means your best days,” the smiling receptionist at the Koreana Hotel in Seoul confirmed matter-of-factly, in between mentioning that breakfast needed to be booked a day in advance and looking totally baffled at the mention of Mark Viduka, Smith’s favourite strike partner.

Lee Dong-hyun, who is an academy scout for Incheon, one of the K-League clubs, knows much more about the context to the phrase and laughed when “Leeds Days” was brought up at the end of our interview about youth football in South Korea.

“Everyone knows it,” Lee says. “Most of them don’t know about Leeds United. But it’s become a common (saying) in Korea.

“For example, when someone is remembering when they were younger, like a teenager, or in their twenties, they say, ‘That’s my Leeds Days.’ But the phrase has now spread to other generations.”

It turns out there is even a television show in South Korea (upwards of 75 episodes) titled “Leeds Era Once Again”. According to the show’s introduction, the programme provides a platform for people to tell their stories “to help them to get a new golden time of their lives”.

Naturally, “Leeds Days” is now in the dictionary in Korea too. The entry reads: “A similar meaning to ‘heyday, ‘golden period’, etc. It is used to represent the past when it was brilliant”.

There is a reference to the part of Alan Smith in all of this too.

On the face of it, Smith’s involvementis curious. After all, there were much bigger names in English football back in the early 2000s.

Smith, however, happened to be playing for Manchester United in 2005, when Park Ji-sung, the most famous South Korean footballer at the time, moved to Old Trafford, prompting a huge spike in interest in the club in the Far East.

It was also an era when online football communities were taking off in South Korea, and that’s where Smith’s performances for United (he struggled to make much of an impression, scoring only 12 goals across 93 appearances, and suffered a terrible injury at Anfield) became a talking point.

Those in South Korea more familiar with Smith’s backstory — the forward had been something of a cult figure at Elland Road and a thorn in the side of Premier League defenders with his combative, all-action style — constantly referenced his “Leeds days” on internet forums, essentially to explain how good he used to be, and that ended up planting the seed for a phrase that soon transcended football.

When The Athletic’s Charlie Eccleshare discussed this topic on the Football Cliches podcast two years ago, after returning from Tottenham Hotspur’s pre-season tour in South Korea, some of the replies on social media made for interesting reading.

"Those were his Leeds days."@CDEccleshare tells @FootballCliches and @D_C_W about how 'Leeds Days' has amazingly become a common South Korean phrase thanks to Park Ji-Sung and Alan Smith…

🎙️ 𝗙𝗢𝗢𝗧𝗕𝗔𝗟𝗟 𝗖𝗟𝗜𝗖𝗛𝗘𝗦 pic.twitter.com/Z6biSXRCjF

— The Athletic | Football (@TheAthleticFC) July 27, 2022

“I went and looked this up after,” Ben Davies (not the Spurs defender) posted on Twitter. “Apparently, Korean Instagram is full of middle-aged women posting pics of themselves when they were 18 with ‘Leeds Days’ hashtags.”

Er, there’s no ‘apparently’ about it.

After being a little underwhelmed by the initial search results, the recruitment of a translator proved to be a game-changer. Park In-wook, who spent a week ferrying me around South Korea (in pursuit of Jesse Lingard rather than middle-aged women on Instagram), highlighted a key error in the search term.

“Leeds Days”, Park In-wook explained, should be typed in Korean.

“Lijeu Sijeol,” he said, spelling it out letter by letter.

Cue laughter when he glanced across and saw the updated results. “It’s going to take you a while to look through those!”

There were 108,000 posts of anyone and everyone, including film stars (Keira Knightley, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio), footballers (the Brazilian Ronaldo), members of the royal family (Prince William) and, yes, middle-aged women in South Korea too, all pictured now and in their prime. Or, to borrow the correct term in South Korea, in their “Leeds Days”.

Park In-wook shakes his head. “Somehow from the internet that (expression) became commonly used,” he adds.

“And, usually, you would use it in terms of a person’s appearance – when you were good looking and you were young and you were having a great time.

“Someone might say, ‘Oh, your looks are ‘Lijeu Sijeol!’ — ‘Leeds era’. That means you’re looking really good right now. Or something is ‘Lijeu Sijeol.’”

It’s unclear how successful that might be as a chat-up line. But what we can say is that “Leeds Days” is pretty much ubiquitous in South Korea. A YouTube channel is dedicated to the phenomenon and has hugely popular videos that routinely attract hundreds of thousands of views, or millions in the case of Ahn Jung-hwan.

Hailed a national hero after scoring the goal that knocked Italy out of the 2002 World Cup, Ahn was also a heartthrob in South Korea because of his model-like looks. Unfortunately, age has caught up with Ahn, as it does with us all, which means that his “Leeds Days” were more than 20 years ago.

Park In-wook smiles. “Obviously older generations have no idea what that expression means. But quite a lot of people who don’t even watch football, know.”

Presumably, though, they won’t know the origin of it?

“No,” Park In-wook replies, laughing. “They would have no idea about ‘Leeds’ – it’s just some foreign word to them.”

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

A former professional footballer with Swindon Town, Stuart James went onto spend 15 years working for The Guardian, where he reported on far too many relegation battles to mention, one miraculous Premier League title triumph and a couple of World Cups. He joined The Athletic as a Senior Writer in 2019. Follow Stuart on Twitter @stujames75