Why Ju Se-jong is no longer Daejeon Hana Citizen captain

Ju Se-jong is no longer Daejeon Hana Citizen skipper but he hasn't been stripped of the captaincy, rather the armband has been given to Cho Yu-min due to his leadership style.

Daejeon announced their leadership group on January 23rd, with Cho Yu-min taking over from Ju Se-jong as club captain and Lee Chang-geun, Kang Yoon-seong, and Anton Kryvotsyuk named as vice-captains. For Cho, it was a case of reassuming the captaincy from the very person who took it off him in the first place last season.

But Daejeon manager Lee Min-sung, speaking to InterFootball during the club's pre-season training camp in Hanoi, explained the change in skipper:

"Ju Se-jong really put a lot of effort in, but there were some difficult aspects [for him]. It's good to have someone to bring the players together, but there were times when we needed someone to get them to focus and lead. Rather than it being a case of Ju Se-jong not doing that, Cho Yu-min is the sort of captain who's brimming with energy."

When Cho Yu-min's captaincy was given to Ju Se-jong originally, it was partly due to Cho's inclusion in the national team. He had missed some matches during Daejeon's K League 2 promotion campaign due to national team duty.

"Because we thought that Cho Yu-min would have to leave the group and go off for national team duty, we gave the captaincy to Ju Se-jong. I'm really grateful to Ju Se-jong. I think he felt a lot of pressure and his performances suffered a bit as a result. Every time that happened, he worried an awful lot. 

It was to the point where I felt sorry for him. But as an experienced player, I expect him to offer support and have a positive influence."

Ju Se-jong, too, admits that he found his first stint as a club captain. Speaking to the club's official YouTube channel for the end-of-season documentary series, Ju was very honest in talking about his struggles:

"The period during which we'd lost our way was long. But, in truth, at this point, I hadn't had a lot of experience being a captain, it was my first time being the captain of a professional team. Looking at the players and seeing how exhausted they looked, I thought I could get them to work a bit harder and be a bit livelier, but how could I do that? I agonised a lot about that and did a lot of thinking and because I was having a lot of those thoughts, my performances on the pitch suffered, and I made mistakes. Because of that, even just saying things to the players at that time was difficult for me. With a lot of those things overlapping, that was what was most difficult for me. I'm the person who's supposed to be helping to lift the other players, but because the person who was supposed to be leading them was finding things difficult, personally I felt distressed."

[READ: 2024 K League 1 season to begin March 1st]

Daejeon begin the new season on March 1st with an away trip to Jeonju to take on Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors.