FC Seoul was officially announced on 18 August as the new club and founded on 22 December 1983 (41 years ago) (1983-12-22) as Lucky-Goldstar Football Club, owned and financially supported by the Lucky-Goldstar Group (now LG Group), with Chungcheong Province as its franchise and Hwangso (Hwangso means bull) as its mascot.
In order to launch the professional football club, Lucky Goldstar Group had a preparation period from 1982[1] and demanded that original franchise should be Seoul.
The club fared better in 1985 when they won the Championship with the help of Thai international Piyapong Pue-On, who was the top goalscorer, as well as the league leader in assists.
From the beginning of 1988, Lucky-Goldstar Hwangso pushed forward a relocation to Seoul[3] At the end of the 1989 season, the Korea Professional Football League (renamed as the K League in 1998), worried about the financial stability of the clubs, invited a number of clubs to play in Seoul.
After several seasons in Seoul, the club was forced to move in 1996, as part of the K League's decentralization policy.
In the upcoming years, a solid base of supporters was formed, and it established a strong league rivalry with the Suwon Samsung Bluewings, partly fueled also by the fact that LG Group and Samsung Group, which owned the Suwon club, were also considered rivals in the business world, especially in electronics.
The club continued to grow and, in 2000, they won their third Championship, behind the firepower of striker Choi Yong-Soo.
This was designed to avoid, or at least minimize, any financial losses through having to maintain a stadium in playing condition without regular income.
The Anyang LG Cheetahs, with the financial backing of the LG Group (who not only viewed the move to Seoul as a way to increase its advertising presence, but had the right to come back to Seoul because it had its franchise moved by force in the 1990s) announced in February 2004 that it would pay the share of the construction fees (which turned out to be 15 billion wons, or at that time US$15 million).
Following a draw with Gwangju Sangmu, Seoul could not score and was defeated by Suwon Samsung.
There were no major injuries and although Park Chu-young, the ace of FC Seoul, transferred to AS Monaco, the double dragons of FC Seoul (Ki Sung-Yong, Lee Chung-Yong) made big progress and Dejan Damjanović scored 14 goals.
After showing poor form in several matches after that, it looked impossible for Seoul to qualify for the second round, but a dramatic come-from-behind victory over reigning champion Gamba Osaka and Sriwijaya's unexpected victory over Shandong Luneng enabled them to advance to the second round with taking second place in Group F. On June 24, 2009, they beat the Kashima Antlers in the Round of 16 and went on to the quarterfinal.
[citation needed] FC Seoul recorded an attendance of 60,747 on May 5, 2010 at Seoul World Cup Stadium, This is the highest single-match attendance record of South Korean professional sports history.