2026 Season Preview: FC Seoul

Sangam’s sky was still dark when the gates reopened for pre-season training, yet the questions hovering over FC Seoul are impossible to miss. A year after finishing fourth and flirting with Asian Champions League football, the capital club staggered to sixth in 2025, weighed down by a blunt attack, brittle defending and the lingering sense that a squad packed with promise had again under-delivered. With the 2026 Hana Bank K League 1 campaign looming, manager Kim Gi-dong concedes the pressure is “only natural” but insists the ingredients for a rebound are already in the dressing-room.

The numbers from last season tell their own sobering story. Seoul collected 49 points, fewer than seventh-place Gwangju and the same tally as newly promoted FC Anyang. They lost 11 of 38 league matches, conceded 53 goals and, most damning for a side that generated an league-high 62.5 expected goals, found the net only 50 times. Big chances were spurned with almost masochistic regularity—57 in total—while the Sangam faithful witnessed just seven home wins from 19 attempts and never back-to-back victories on their own patch.

Change, therefore, was essential. Jesse Lingard’s headline-grabbing departure opens a creative void, but Jeonbuk wide-man Song Min-kyu arrives to fill it, reuniting with Kim after their successful stint together at Pohang. Colombian striker Leonardo Ruiz, signed from K League 2 outfit Seongnam, carries the immediate burden of converting Seoul’s avalanche of chances; his 19 goals in the second tier last year suggest he knows exactly where the net is. Between the posts, Gu Sung-yun, once capped by Korea and freshly signed from cross-town Seoul E-Land, will push incumbent Kang Hyun-mu, whose errors proved costly in the run-in. At centre-back, the protracted contract wrangle surrounding Yazan Al-Arab forced sporting directors into the international market; they landed Juan Antonio Ros, a 26-year-old Spaniard schooled in Barcelona’s La Masia and hardened by two seasons with Tianjin Jinmen Tiger.

Depth, however, remains a concern. Full-back berths look thin beyond the starters, and another injury to either first-choice central defender could expose a threadbare pool of experience. The club’s U22 cupboard is equally bare. Centre-back Ham Sun-woo, impressive on loan at Hwaseong, is available for European transfer, leaving Ivorian winger Samuel Gbato as the only other under-age prospect to have tasted senior minutes—just 46 of them in 2025. Instead, supporters may pin development hopes on teenage midfielders Go Pil-gwan and Son Jeong-beom, both graduates of the national U18 setup. Go’s metronomic passing and defensive diligence complement Son’s dribbling and late-box runs, offering Kim potential solutions to a midfield that too often stalled in the final third.

Expectations are no longer whispered in private; they are broadcast from every corner of the city. Ulsan, dynastic for much of the past decade, begin a rebuild under new leadership, while Jeonbuk navigate their own transition. The path to the summit, many argue, has rarely been clearer for a Seoul side that has spent half a decade labelled “dark horses” without ever entering the penultimate straight with genuine momentum. Whether Kim Gi-dong can finally coax consistency from a squad dripping with attacking talent—and plug the leaks that undermined last term—will decide if 2026 is remembered as the year Sangam reclaimed its place among K League royalty or merely another chapter in a story of what might have been.