The top two divisions of South Korean professional football enjoyed their most successful season at the gates on record in 2023, figures showed Thursday.

The Korea Professional Football League said gate receipts for the K League 1 and K League 2 amounted to just over 33.8 billion won (US$25.8 million) last season, the largest such figure since the league began tracking gate revenues in 2013.

It more than doubled the 2022 gate revenue of 16.3 billion won. The previous record was 19.5 billion won in 2019.

The top-flight K League 1 accounted for about 30.2 billion won of the receipts for 2022. FC Seoul led the way for 12 clubs with 5.7 billion won, followed by the league champions Ulsan HD FC at 4.3 billion won.

Those numbers were helped by record-breaking attendance numbers. The two leagues combined to attract 3.01 million fans in 2023, well over the previous record of 2.36 million from 2019.

The K League 1 drew 2.4 million supporters, and the K League 2 had about 564,000 fans, both of them their own divi
sion records.

Source: Yonhap News Agency