✦Nobody has planted a flag there
That line is the center of the sixth episode. I asked Junwoo Kim, a football agent, why he keeps knocking on doors in markets other people skip. His answer, translated from the Korean:
In a main market where the main players already are, you have no choice but to be a minor figure until you build up a certain amount of power. So I thought going somewhere nobody has planted a flag, and going in as a major player, might be a strategy in itself.
He called it a survival strategy rather than a taste. In practice that meant sending a Korean player to Iceland and a volleyball player to Taiwan. Vietnam as well.
This note is about how that judgment gets made, and what he looks at before deciding whether a market is worth entering. The industry is sport. The way of choosing a market is the same anywhere, including the one I work in.
✦Why the big market puts you at the bottom
The reasoning is simple. Large markets already have powerful players in position. Inside them you remain minor until your weight catches up. Presence does not appear before capability and influence do.
A market nobody has entered lets you begin as a principal player instead. It means taking a position where something close to a monopoly is still available.
Search behaves identically. A brand new site that goes head on at a large keyword takes a long time and usually fails. Which is why the note on long tail keywords lists the actual numbers behind the topics on this site. They are all somewhere around two hundred searches.
✦Four things to check before you enter
So is any empty market fine? No. There were specific things he looked at.
Which led to a conclusion worth sitting with. The fundamentals of choosing a market are not industry knowledge.
If we are talking about the basic qualities of an agent, I actually think language is an important part, and I think you have to be very interested in the humanities and social sciences.
Every agent knows which foot the ball comes off. That is not where the difference is. The difference comes from being able to read what state a country is currently in.
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✦Reading the signals, the Pyongyang case
That can sound abstract, so here is the concrete case. During a warmer period in inter Korean relations, an under fifteen international tournament hosted by South Korea was held in North Korea. Junwoo Kim was responsible for bringing participating teams in.
He approached the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands through embassies and consulates. All of them declined. It was not long after the case of the American student who was detained in North Korea and died following his return in 2017, and no parent was willing to send a fifteen year old.
So he changed the criteria.
Choosing Belarus came from going through all the embassies. Among the countries that have a North Korean embassy, Belarus was the one worth contacting. I thought the presence of a North Korean embassy proved a certain level of relationship.
He read the location of embassies as an indicator of relationship. He worked backwards from public information to the probability of entry. The Belarusian team went, and because UN sanctions ruled out commercial flights, they travelled through Moscow and Vladivostok to reach Pyongyang.
It was not smooth either. When the tournament was postponed twice the Belarusian side changed its mind and said it would not come, and he went in person to persuade them. A correct read on entry is one thing. Execution is a separate job attached to it.
Is there still open space in your category?
Going head on at a contested keyword is often slower than finding the seat nobody has taken. Send me your site and target market, and I'll tell you whether I can help.
Send me a note✦Sometimes the market picks you
Entry does not run in one direction. A stretch late in the episode about the K League shows the reverse, and it is the part most relevant if the market you are entering is Korea.
It started from surprise that Jesse Lingard had joined FC Seoul. The answer was not about money.
There are a great many cases where a player chooses Korea even when another region offers the same salary or a slightly higher one. Because of external factors.
Players with families weigh the living environment. Safety, schooling for the children, confidence that wages will not be delayed. Cultural factors such as food, dramas, and cosmetics often play a part as well. He was clear that he did not handle the Lingard transfer and could not speak to the facts of it, while saying he doubted money was the whole story.
There is something to take from that. When you choose which market to enter, you also have to calculate how that market will look at you. If your only appeal is price, price is the only axis you will be compared on.
He also mentioned how a club used this. He represents a Mongolian player whose parent company ran a Mongolian Day, inviting Mongolians living in Korea to attend the match and an event alongside it. Having entered the market, they built a small arena of their own inside it.
✦The same call, made in search
In order: decide whether to be minor in a large market or major in a small one, check whether contracts hold and whether there is room to grow, read the signals in public information for whether entry is possible, and finally calculate how that market will see you.
Counting which countries host an embassy and counting who occupies the first page of a search result, and when those pages were last updated, are the same activity. The note on YouTube search has a case where a small channel took over a results page precisely because the videos above it had stopped publishing. Confirming the empty seat first is the starting point in both.
How to prepare for the negotiation that follows is in the note on negotiation. That comes after you have chosen the market.
How I work is on the services page, and the other episodes are in the episode list.
Sources and notes
- The Insung Song SEO Podcast, EP 06, with Junwoo Kim, published 11 May 2026. Recorded in Korean. Watch it
- FIFA, Agents. Official FIFA guidance on the transfer system. Read it
The quotations are Junwoo Kim's words from the episode, translated from Korean by me. He noted himself that he did not remember the exact year and schedule of the tournament, so that is left as he said it. The transcript was produced by automatic recognition and misreads some names and places, so I quoted only passages where the meaning was unambiguous.
✦Common questions
Large markets already have established players, and until you have the weight to match them you stay a minor participant. In a market nobody has entered you can start as a major one. The guest on episode six called this a survival strategy rather than a preference.
Four things. Whether contracts are honored and what recourse exists if they are not, room to grow measured by things like population and GDP, the international situation including wars and sanctions, and whether the party going in gets something out of it. Skip the last one and the arrangement does not last.
By reading signals in public information. Episode six describes using the question of which countries host a North Korean embassy as an indicator of relationship, which led to picking Belarus. Reading the situation matters more than industry knowledge.
Yes. Episode six covers why foreign players choose the K League, and salary is not the whole answer. Safety, schooling for children, and confidence that wages will arrive on time all count. If your only appeal is price, price is the only thing you will be compared on.
I help companies grow in search, mostly on Google, in Korea and across borders. Since 2021, the field has taught me to look at content and structure together rather than chasing one technical fix.
