Contents · About 13 min read
- The match ended and the concert began: from the 2018 pitch show to BIG CROWN LIVE 2026
- What kind of stadium is Munsu? A roof like a crane taking off, and a World Cup quarterfinal
- What kind of team is Ulsan HD? Five K League 1 titles, and from ninth in 2025 to second in 2026
- How to get to Munsu and how to buy tickets: based on official club and stadium guidance
- Attendance and ticket numbers: 353,615 home fans in 2024, ₩5.8 billion in gate revenue
- Food, merchandise and sponsors: 16 shops, ₩100 million in two days at the permanent store
- A baseball team next to the soccer stadium: Munsu Baseball Stadium and the Ulsan Whales
- Compared with J.League: Ulsan averaged 18,611, J1 averaged 20,355
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The biggest Ulsan HD matchday of the year came after the final whistle on Saturday, October 17, with a 4:30 p.m. kickoff. The streets around Munsu Football Stadium reportedly began to clog more than three hours before the game.
The club’s post-match report says parking problems began three to four hours before kickoff, and the event booths and the food and merchandise shops all had long lines. The crowd that day was 25,017, the largest for a single Ulsan game this season.
As a marketer, what I most wanted to know from that number was not the match itself but how much fuller the stands get when you add a concert afterward. The season’s previous high was 20,173 against Jeonbuk on July 11, so this day brought in 4,844 more.
I tallied Ulsan’s home attendance this season from the K League’s official schedule and results data. Through the November 1 game against Gangwon, 18 home games drew 206,696 in total, an average of 11,483, which makes the concert day about 2.2 times a normal crowd.
For first-time visitors, this guide sets out how to get to Munsu and how to buy tickets, based on club notices and public sources (checked November 2, 2026). It then reads Ulsan HD’s attendance, food and merchandise numbers from a marketer’s side.
Where I could not confirm something, I did not fill it in; I say that I could not confirm it.
Photo: provided by Ulsan HD (a press photo published in an Ilgan Sports article of October 19, 2026) · View of the stadium during BIG CROWN LIVE 2026 on October 17, 2026
The match ended and the concert began: from the 2018 pitch show to BIG CROWN LIVE 2026
BIG CROWN LIVE 2026 was a stage that followed the Round 32 Hana Bank K League 1 match between Ulsan HD and Bucheon FC 1995. In the club’s September 23 notice, the lineup was Choi Ye-na, Chuu, Lee Young-hyun and Solji, and the club described it as a large music festival of more than 100 minutes.
The same notice records that Ulsan held the K League’s first post-match pitch concert in August 2018 (with the singer Eun Ga-eun), so you can read the eight-year-old idea as having grown to this scale.
The stage preparation was big too. Concert-grade sound was added throughout the stadium, and the 360-degree LED ribbon boards on all four sides, introduced early this year (the club calls them a K League first), were used in the show.
According to the club, more than 120 high-performance speakers were added, along with moving lights, CO2 jets and spotlights, and the whole stadium was washed in blue, the club’s color.
Photo: provided by Ulsan HD (a press photo published in an Ilgan Sports article of October 19, 2026) · Stands packed with a season-high 25,017 on the day of the Bucheon match, October 17, 2026
Booking opened with membership priority on October 12 and general sale at noon on Wednesday, October 14. The club said the main premium seats sold out in 10 minutes and every seat on the first and second levels in about five hours.
Ticket prices for the match were the same as for other home games, with a prize draw for home appliances tied in with HD Hyundai Heavy Industries. Ulsan won 2-1 on goals by Lee Jin-hyun and Yago, kept second place and secured a spot in the Final A group (Ilgan Sports reported the same).
Honestly, this number alone cannot separate whether the song or the match filled the seats. A club official said it will keep running mixed cultural events that combine sport and entertainment.
Adding more than 4,800 people on the same ticket prices, without raising them, read to me as a design that bets on seat occupancy and on-site spending rather than on gate revenue.
Photo: Korece, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Taken July 15, 2026, entrance of Munsu Football Stadium
What kind of stadium is Munsu? A roof like a crane taking off, and a World Cup quarterfinal
Munsu Football Stadium opened on April 28, 2001. A 2001 Seoul Shinmun article from just before the opening says the exterior takes the shape of a crane, Ulsan’s city bird, about to take flight, and that the parts that correspond to the crane’s wings are tension cables (steel wires that hold by being pulled taut).
With no columns, 64 masts (pillar-shaped supports) pull and hold up the concrete structure, which the article called a first for Korea. The entrance waterfall wall is said to carry a whale figure from the Bangudae petroglyphs of Ulsan.
Photo: Haena96, Wikimedia Commons · CC0 · Taken March 1, 2024, Pohang away fans applauding the team after a match
The stadium hosted three games at the 2002 World Cup. According to the English Wikipedia, they were Uruguay v Denmark on June 1 (1-2, 30,157), Brazil v Turkey on June 3 (2-1, 33,842) and the Germany v United States quarterfinal on June 21 (1-0, 37,337).
It is owned by the city of Ulsan and run by the Ulsan Facilities Corporation, and Ulsan HD has used it as its home since 2001. Capacity differs by source.
The article from the opening says 43,550 seats and Wikipedia says 37,897, so I could not pin down the current exact seat count. Both sources agree that construction cost was around ₩151.4 billion.
What kind of team is Ulsan HD? Five K League 1 titles, and from ninth in 2025 to second in 2026
Ulsan HD was founded on December 6, 1983 as Hyundai Horang-i (Tigers), went through Ulsan Hyundai FC, and took its current name in December 2023. The English Wikipedia lists five K League 1 titles (1996, 2005, 2022, 2023 and 2024) and two AFC Champions League titles (2012 and 2020).
The supporters group Cheoyong Warriors was formed in 1997, and the club meets Pohang Steelers in the East Coast Derby and Jeonbuk Hyundai in the Hyundai Family Derby.
Last year was rough. Ulsan finished ninth of 12 in 2025, went through manager changes including the dismissal of Shin Tae-yong during the season, and secured survival even after losing the final match.
This year the Ulsan-born legend Kim Hyun-seok took his first K League 1 job as manager (February 2026 report).
With the October 17 win over Bucheon, Ulsan stayed second with 50 points, and, per the club, Lee Dong-gyeong had 11 goals and 12 assists in 31 games and Yago led the scoring with 16. League leader Seoul were 16 points clear of second-place Ulsan and secured the title before the final round began.
In the final round, Ulsan drew 2-2 at home with Pohang on October 24 and beat Gangwon 2-1 at home on November 1 (K League official schedule and results).
The rest of November is away at Seoul on the 8th and at Incheon on the 21st, and the next Munsu home game is against Jeonbuk (the Hyundai Family Derby) at 2 p.m. on the 29th. Please recheck the venue and time with the club before you go.
How to get to Munsu and how to buy tickets: based on official club and stadium guidance
The checking date is November 2, 2026. The ticket-booking page on the club’s official site (uhdfc.com) still would not open as readable text that day, so I could not check the price list or the seating chart myself.
What follows is gathered from club notices and public sources, and I should say first that it is not information I confirmed on an official access-guide page.
The address is 44 Munsu-ro, Nam-gu, Ulsan (Ok-dong). It is on the outskirts, away from the city center, so you need a plan for getting there.
An English stadium guide puts it at about 5.5 km from Ulsan City Hall, about 7.5 km from the express bus terminal and about 17 km from Ulsan KTX station, and a 2023 visit report by a foreign groundhopper says 9 km from the terminal, so distances differ a little by source.
That report says Ulsan has no subway, that the 5004 direct express bus from downtown took about 45 minutes to the door, and that buses fill up quickly after a match. Routes such as 104, 114, 411, 426 and 407 that another guide lists have unclear dates, so it is safer to recheck routes in a map app before leaving.
One review also said that taxis and buses after the game are faster from the north stand side.
The tourism-information page lists parking at 3,970 spaces, but on a day like this BIG CROWN LIVE, when the area around the stadium clogged three to four hours before kickoff, a car was more of a variable. The same page gives 052-220-2002 for stadium inquiries.
Photo: Haena96, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0 · Taken February 16, 2025, FC Anyang fans in the away section of Munsu Football Stadium
As the club notice says, tickets are booked on the official Ulsan HD website and on the Ticketlink website and app. The order is membership priority booking, then general booking.
The 2025-season membership notice gave priority booking five days before a match and general booking three days before, but I could not confirm the rules for 2026. Membership is joined on the official site and has five tiers, each with a different range of seats it can book first (per the 2025 notice).
Since I could not confirm an official price list, I give only the figures from a visit report three years old, for reference. It listed general seats in the west stand at ₩18,000, ₩14,000 and up in the east, south and north stands, and ₩75,000 for table seats, which may differ from current prices.
What is certain is the club notice that the BIG CROWN LIVE match had the same price as other home games. I could not confirm whether cards issued abroad work, how mobile-ticket entry works, the re-entry and bag rules, or whether there is an English booking screen.
The club’s main phone number is listed at the bottom of its site as 052-209-7000.
For overseas fans, I think the biggest hurdle is the booking flow rather than the price. Popular matches sell out the first and second levels within hours of general sale opening at noon, and the guides assume you use a Korean booking app.
One overseas fan who had visited the stadium advised buying food 15 minutes before halftime, which also suggested that the lines are long.
Attendance and ticket numbers: 353,615 home fans in 2024, ₩5.8 billion in gate revenue
According to figures that Sports Seoul compiled in December 2024, Ulsan’s 19 home games in 2023 drew 345,990 in total (an average of 18,210), passing 300,000 for the first time in the club’s history, and 2024 set a new record at 353,615 (an average of 18,611).
The 2019 pre-COVID average was 9,692, so the figure has nearly doubled. Ulsan has about 1.1 million residents, so the article calculates that, in cumulative attendance, one in three citizens visited the stadium.
Gate revenue was ₩2 billion in the 2022 season, ₩4.2 billion in 2023 and ₩5.8 billion in 2024. The club once put its 2023 ticket revenue at ₩4 billion (Sports Kyunghyang, May 2024), so the two sources differ by about ₩200 million, probably because of timing or basis.
Dividing 2024 gate revenue by total attendance gives about ₩16,400 per person, but that is an average that mixes season tickets and discounts, not an actual ticket price.
For this season I tallied the figures myself from the K League’s official schedule and results data (18 home games, through the November 1 game against Gangwon). The total is 206,696 and the average 11,483, lower than the 2024 average of 18,611, and 25,017 is about 2.2 times this season’s average.
The home games after the concert drew 15,228 against Pohang on October 24 and 7,038 against Gangwon on November 1. These numbers alone cannot show whether the concert’s effect carried over to the next game; they only show how much the figure swings with the opponent, the weekday and the time slot.
Food, merchandise and sponsors: 16 shops, ₩100 million in two days at the permanent store
According to a Sports Kyunghyang article of May 27, 2024, the stadium has 16 shops, food stands, restaurants and cafés, which open four hours before kickoff. With about 25 home games a year, the club invited local businesses without entry fees, and in April 2024 it also opened a permanent store in Nam-gu.
That store reportedly took ₩100 million in sales in two days. The club’s 2023 figures were ₩4 billion in tickets, ₩1.6 billion in merchandise and ₩1.4 billion in food and drink.
For the 2024 season, Sports Seoul reported total uniform and merchandise sales of ₩9 billion (₩1 billion of it counted as licensing revenue in the club’s accounts) and total F&B sales of ₩2 billion (₩400 million recognized as club revenue).
Uniform sales rose from about 15,000 in 2023 to about 25,000 in 2024, with a 2025 target of 35,000. The scope of the counts differs, so they cannot be compared directly with the ₩1.6 billion of merchandise in 2023.
On sponsors, the ties to group affiliates stand out. In October 2024, HD Hyundai Infracore held a Develon brand day and invited more than 700 people, including employees and families and children from local partner programs, and the membership benefits included double HD Hyundai Oilbank fuel points.
HD Hyundai Heavy Industries was also named a co-organizer of this BIG CROWN LIVE and ran a booth on site. I did not find a naming-rights contract (the right to put a company’s name on a facility) for the stadium, but the 360-degree LED ribbon boards look likely to serve as new advertising inventory (ad space that can be sold), though that part is my own estimate.
A baseball team next to the soccer stadium: Munsu Baseball Stadium and the Ulsan Whales
Right next to Munsu Football Stadium is Munsu Baseball Stadium, which opened in 2014. An OSEN article from October 2024 reported that the ballpark was underused then, hosting only about six first-team games a year as a second home of the Lotte Giants, and that Ulsan’s mayor grew interested in baseball after visiting ES CON Field in Sapporo, Japan.
Ulsan later gained the Ulsan Whales, a citizen-run team in the KBO Futures League. The home opener drew 7,299, and as of a July 15 report it had passed 50,000 over 37 games, an average of 1,364 per game.
The last home game of the season was held on September 13 at Munsu Baseball Stadium, with special advance prices starting at ₩1,000.
Photo: Rienzi, Wikimedia Commons · CC0 · Taken September 5, 2023 (a three-year-old photo), a night game seen from the top of the first-base infield at Munsu Baseball Stadium
In the same complex, soccer draws crowds in the tens of thousands and baseball crowds in the low thousands. The numbers are very different, but with two sports on one site they can share the parking, food and merchandise flows, so what synergy that brings to stadium operations is worth watching.
Compared with J.League: Ulsan averaged 18,611, J1 averaged 20,355
I skip the comparison with domestic clubs and carry over only the overseas comparison from the same Sports Seoul article. In the 2024 season the J1 League (20 clubs) averaged 20,355 per game, and Ulsan’s 18,611 was about 90% of that.
The same article calculated that Ulsan’s 2024 revenue of ₩48 billion would put it in the upper half of J1 on 2023 figures.
BIG CROWN LIVE’s 25,017 is above that J1 average, so whether an event-style home game can lift the average by a notch is what is left to watch. Still, this season’s Ulsan home average (11,483) is a little over half the 2024 J1 average (a comparison across different seasons), so how to fill the seats on non-concert days is a homework item too.
My reading is that the full stands on the concert day were more a designed result than an accident (the club did not say so; this is my estimate). For a first visit, watching a single match here is reason enough, but if a concert or event falls on the same day, you have one more reason to arrive early.
See Ulsan HD’s food guide and team page too.
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