The Summer of 2002

In the afternoon, the square is still empty.

A few early arrivals sit right down on the pavement to hold their places. High above, workers are putting up a giant screen. Drink vendors wheel in their carts and open their umbrellas.

Then the afternoon slides toward evening, and the people start to come.

At first it is small groups walking up from the subway station. Then the crowd thickens. Then there are too many to count, and the whole square turns a single color.

Red.

In the summer of 2002, this scene played out in cities all over South Korea, seven times, once for each match.

That year's World Cup ran from May 31 to June 30. And it had something the tournament had never seen before. For the first time, a World Cup was hosted by more than one country.

The two countries were South Korea and Japan.

They were neighbors with a past that had been anything but easy. Yet they stepped forward together to organize one tournament, and they shared its matches between them.

Co-hosting sounds simple, but in practice it is complicated. The two countries had to agree on a great many things: where the stadiums would be, which matches would be played on which side, and how the teams would travel between the two. In all the World Cups before it, no one had ever had to solve a puzzle like that.

And for that whole month, two countries with a heavy shared past did one job together, in front of the whole world.

Then the tournament began, and the home team did something no one had predicted.

South Korea beat Poland. Then they beat Portugal. Then, in the knockout rounds, they beat Italy. Then, in the quarterfinal, they beat Spain.

And they went all the way to the semifinal.

This milestone was much bigger than it might seem. In the whole history of the World Cup up to then, every team to reach the semifinals had come from three familiar regions: Europe, South America, or North and Central America. South Korea was the first team from outside all three to get that far.

But the most remarkable part of that summer did not happen on the field.

It happened in the streets.

South Koreans call their supporters' group the Red Devils. The name goes back to 1983. That year, a South Korean youth team reached the semifinal of a world youth championship held in Mexico. The international press gave the young players a nickname, the Red Furies. The official supporters' group was founded much later, in December 1995.

In 2002, that group did something very simple. They called on one another to come out into the streets and watch together.

And here are the numbers.

The match against Poland: about eight hundred thousand people in the streets.

The match against the United States: about one and a half million.

The match against Portugal: about two million eight hundred thousand.

The match against Italy: about four million two hundred thousand people.

That is four million two hundred thousand people standing outside together, on one night, in one country.

The figure climbs from match to match. First eight hundred thousand. Then one and a half million. Then two million eight hundred thousand. Then four million two hundred thousand. The further the team went, the more crowded the streets became. Most of the people out on any given night had heard all about the night before.

No one made it happen by giving orders. It grew the way good news spreads through a neighborhood.

Added up across all seven of South Korea's matches that summer, the street crowds came to about 22 million, counting each person once for every match.

Meanwhile, the total crowd inside the stadiums for the whole tournament was about two million seven hundred thousand. That count covers all 64 matches, in both countries.

In other words, the street crowds of South Korea alone were many times larger than the stadium crowds of the entire tournament.

That is what the summer of 2002 really left behind. Not a championship, because South Korea did not win the title. It left a new habit. People watched soccer not at home in the living room, but out in the street, beside millions of strangers in shirts of the same color.

That way of watching later spread very widely. Anyone who has watched a match with the neighbors, sitting on the sidewalk in front of a big screen, has done something the summer of 2002 made familiar all over the world.