{"id":346351,"date":"2026-01-01T12:36:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T12:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/346351\/"},"modified":"2026-01-01T12:36:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-01T12:36:06","slug":"how-leeds-united-stars-manchester-united-transfer-spawned-korean-phrase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/346351\/","title":{"rendered":"How Leeds United star&#8217;s Manchester United transfer spawned Korean phrase"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Most people there don&#8217;t know the etymology of it, so I find myself explaining it,&#8221; says Josh Wileman, who was Leeds United&#8217;s South Korean supporter group contact.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Mr Wileman, originally from Hemsworth in West Yorkshire, moved 5,000 miles away to South Korea in 2017, where he spent most of the next eight years as an English teacher, before returning home last month. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He says that when he was 12 years old, Smith&#8217;s trans-Pennine transfer was his first footballing &#8220;heartbreak&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It wasn&#8217;t nice to be reminded of that. I suppose. when I first heard the phrase,&#8221; Mr Wileman laughs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It was in my first year out there. I&#8217;d never heard it before I went. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;The first person I was working with was from Barnsley and he was really into his football, so he was the one who explained it to me.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Leeds days&#8221; is believed to have first sprung up on Korean online forums in the 2000s, after one of the country&#8217;s best players &#8211; Park Ji Sung &#8211; joined Manchester United a year after Smith. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#8220;Most people there don&#8217;t know the etymology of it, so I find myself explaining it,&#8221; says Josh Wileman,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":346352,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-346351","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}