Feature
Twenty-Two Goals Up Front, Twin Towers at the Back: the Spine of Seoul E-Land's Run-In
Euller and Park Jae-yong have 11 goals each, the only pair of teammates in K League 2's top five. Behind them, Caio and Osmar, 192 and 191 centimetres, are unbeaten together. What the 6-2 against Gimhae showed about both ends of Seoul E-Land, with the numbers.
Seoul E-Land beat Gimhae 6-2 at a flooded Mokdong on Sunday, and the scoreline hides how the afternoon started: a goal down after twenty minutes against the bottom club, on a pitch where the ball kept stopping dead in standing water. What turned it was the two things this team is built on. Up front, a pair of strikers who have now scored 22 league goals between them. At the back, two centre-backs, 192 and 191 centimetres tall, who kept passing the ball calmly out of a swamp while everything else around them slid.
This piece looks at both, with the league’s own match data. Every number below comes from the K League’s official records unless it says otherwise.
The strikers: 11 and 11
Euller and Park Jae-yong have the same line after 28 matches: 11 goals and 5 assists each. Only Suwon Samsung’s Luis (15), Chungbuk Cheongju’s Garcia (14) and Suwon FC’s Frizzo (13) have scored more in K League 2; Hwaseong’s Plana is level with them on 11, and the league’s own chart puts Euller fourth and Park fifth. They are also joint fourth for goal involvements, 16 each. No other club has two players in that top five.
Between them they have 22 of Seoul’s 52 league goals, 42 percent of the total. Add Baek Ji-woong’s four from centre-back and midfield, and three players account for half of everything Seoul have scored.
They are not the same kind of striker, which is the point.
Euller scores in matches Seoul do not lose. He has scored in eight league matches this season and Seoul have won six and drawn two of them. MyDaily counts 18 league matches in which he has scored for the club across two seasons, and Seoul have not lost any of them. Eleven goals in eight matches means he scores in bunches: the hat-trick against Ansan in August, the brace on Sunday. The brace was one of his usual weapons and one he rarely uses. The second, on 85 minutes, was the left-footed free kick everyone in the stadium knew was coming. The first, on 52, was not: Baek Ji-woong switched the play from the left, Euller took it down on the right of the box, shifted it half a beat to his right and hit it with his right foot before the defender’s leg arrived. Asked about it on the broadcast afterward, he said the right foot was the weakness he identified at the very start of his career, that in training he tries “at least to hit the target,” and that defenders always expect the left. “Today one went in, thank God.”
Park Jae-yong scores whatever arrives. He has scored in eleven different matches, more than anyone in the squad, with goals from his head, knee, calf and both feet, and at 191 centimetres he is the target the long ball looks for. Sunday’s equaliser on 24 minutes came from the kind of scramble he lives on: a corner punched out, a first-time volley from Oh In-pyo straight back into a crowded box. The broadcast celebrated it as Oh’s goal; the league’s official record gives it to Park, with Oh’s volley as the assist. Four minutes later Park was the provider, laying the ball off for Alan Carius, whose cross from the left skidded off the wet surface and went straight in.
When both score, Seoul win. It has happened three times: 3-1 against Seongnam in May, 3-1 at Gimhae in July, and 6-2 against Gimhae on Sunday.
The supporting cast matters too. Carius has three goals and three assists in 16 appearances. Kim Hyun, 192 centimetres, came off the bench on Sunday and scored the sixth, his second of the season, and had a seventh ruled out for offside in stoppage time. Oh In-pyo has five assists from right wing-back, level with the two strikers for the most in the squad. And Seoul’s 52 goals are now the second-highest total in the division, one behind Suwon FC’s 53.
That last number is the one that matters for the next six weeks. K League ties are broken on goals scored, not goal difference. Going into the weekend Suwon FC led Seoul by five goals scored, and their win at Seongnam on Saturday made it seven. After the 6-2 they lead by one. Kim Do-gyun knew exactly what he was chasing: it was a match, he said afterward, that needed “three points and goals,” and closing the scoring gap on Suwon FC was “a positive sign.” He sent on Kim Hyun, Cho Jun-hyun, Ahn Joo-wan and Seo Jin-seok, he said, to score more. Seoul and Suwon FC are level on 54 points, Suwon FC have a game in hand, and if it finishes level, the strikers’ work on a wet Sunday in October could be what decides who goes up automatically.
The twin towers: Caio and Osmar
Caio Marcelo is 192 centimetres, Brazilian and left-footed, and played 50 times for Daegu across 2024 and 2025 before signing for Seoul on August 18, a day before the summer window closed. Osmar is 191 centimetres, Spanish and 38, and came to Mokdong from across the city at FC Seoul. Their partnership is new. Sunday was only the third time they have started a league match together. At Seongnam in August Osmar played in midfield in front of Caio; against Daegu and on Sunday they stood side by side in a back three with Baek Ji-woong.
Seoul have not lost any of the three:
| Round | Match | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 24 | at Seongnam | 1-1 |
| 27 | v Daegu | 2-1 |
| 29 | v Gimhae | 6-2 |
That is seven points from nine, with four goals conceded. Three matches is a small sample and nobody should pretend otherwise. The bigger sample belongs to Osmar, and it is the strongest number in Seoul’s season.
Seoul with and without Osmar in the starting eleven:
| Matches | Record | Points per match | Conceded per match | Clean sheets | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Osmar starts | 16 | 11 W, 4 D, 1 L | 2.31 | 0.94 | 5 |
| Osmar does not start | 12 | 5 W, 2 D, 5 L | 1.42 | 1.42 | 3 |
To put those rates in context: Suwon Samsung top the table on 2.19 points per match, and 1.42 is roughly the pace of the side in seventh. Osmar missed eleven of the first sixteen matches, ten of them through three separate injuries (a muscle in March, a month out from April, an ankle in May), and he has started all twelve since the World Cup break, Round 18 to Round 29.
The passing. Calling it tiki-taka is generous for a team that had 49 percent of the ball on Sunday, but the build-up really did run through the two tall men, and on that surface it was the most impressive thing on the pitch. The league’s match data has Caio completing 39 of his 42 passes, 92.9 percent, the best rate of any Seoul starter bar Park Chang-hwan. Osmar completed 42 of 51 before he came off on 75 minutes, and won four aerial duels, level with Baek Ji-woong for the most in the side. Between them they made 93 of Seoul’s 440 passes, more than a fifth of the team’s total, on a surface where, the commentators kept pointing out, the water was so deep that dribbling simply stopped working. Midway through the first half one of them singled out Osmar sweeping up behind the play and said the back line’s timing was working well.
The league’s pass map for Sunday has not been published yet, but it exists for their two earlier starts together, and it shows the same habit. They exchanged 23 passes at Seongnam and 31 against Daegu, Caio to Osmar and back again, the steady short ball that lets a team draw a press and then play around it. Over the whole season Osmar has completed more than 92 percent of his passes in the league’s data, and his most frequent partner on the ball has been Baek Ji-woong, the third man in Sunday’s back line: 408 passes between them, the third-most-used combination in the squad.
The other end. Height is also why Kim Do-gyun has named Caio among the players he wants scoring from set pieces, and why corners have become an event at Mokdong. Seoul won nine corners on Sunday to Gimhae’s seven, and the equaliser came from one of them.
What it did not stop. Both Gimhae goals came from crosses, which is exactly what two tall centre-backs are supposed to deal with: Woo Je-uk’s header from Seong Ho-young’s cross on 20 minutes, and Lee Seung-jae’s finish on 64 from the second phase of a corner, again from Seong’s delivery. Two goals conceded at home to the bottom club is not nothing, and Gyeongnam away on the last day will be a sterner test of whether two towers are enough.
Why it matters now
Seoul have four matches left: Yongin away on October 31, Jeonnam and Chungnam Asan at home, and Gyeongnam away on November 29. They are mathematically certain of a playoff place, and the model behind Chasing K1 gives them a 26 percent chance of the top two after Round 29, with Suwon FC on 74 percent.
The route to the top two runs through both ends of this team. At the back, the record with Osmar starting is the reason Seoul have been in the race at all. Up front, every goal is now a tiebreaker goal. Win all four and Seoul finish on 66 points, which the model says is enough seven times in ten. Do it by scoring plenty, and the one-goal gap to Suwon FC might be the thing that flips.
On Sunday, in the rain, both ends worked at once. Euller, asked afterward what the manager tells them, said Kim Do-gyun keeps repeating the same thing: keep playing the way you have been and the results will come. Four more like it would do.