Why Two Korean Gen Z Sports Fans Can Watch the Same Video and Learn Completely Different Things
South Korea has one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world. Among young people, device access is effectively universal. Yet a peer-reviewed study published on February 28, 2026, by researchers at Kyung Hee University’s Graduate School of Education in Yongin, Gyeonggi-do, found that having a device is not the same as being able to use it well — and in the context of sports content, that gap produces measurably different learning outcomes across members of the same generation.
The study, published in Behavioural Sciences (MDPI), examined how digital literacy levels among Generation Z affect sports learning outcomes through platforms including YouTube, social networking services, mobile apps, and online lecture tools. Its findings challenge a comfortable assumption that many parents, educators, and sports organizations make: that young Koreans, by virtue of growing up with smartphones, all engage with digital sports content from roughly the same foundation.
They do not.
What the Researchers Actually Found
The study classified 237 Generation Z participants into three groups — low, medium, and high digital literacy — and measured how their literacy level affected four key behavioral outcomes: performance expectancy (whether they believed the platform would help them learn), effort expectancy (how hard they expected it to be), social influence (whether peer encouragement affected their use), and facilitating conditions (whether they had adequate support to use the platform effectively).
It also applied Media Richness Theory, which examines how well a given communication channel conveys information — measuring factors like immediate feedback, multiple communication channels, and personalization.
The results were clear: higher digital literacy correlated with stronger scores across all four behavioral dimensions. Participants in the high-literacy group were more confident that video platforms and live coaching tools would deliver useful learning, expended less perceived effort in using them, were more responsive to social encouragement, and reported better access to the support systems needed to make the technology work.
Low-literacy participants showed the opposite pattern. Even when they had the same device access as high-literacy peers, they reported lower expectations of what the platforms could deliver, found them harder to navigate, and were less responsive to the social cues — team chats, instructor feedback loops, comment sections — that help reinforce learning.
The research team noted a contextual finding from national data that sharpens this point: while the National Information Society Agency of Korea reports that 96.5% of the general population has access to digital information, actual digital competency sits at 65.6%. The gap between access and competency is the operative variable, and it persists even within Generation Z.
Why This Matters for Sports Fans, Not Just Students
The study focused on sports learning in educational settings, but its implications extend to how any young person engages with sports content in their daily life. The platforms involved — YouTube coaching tutorials, SNS sports communities, mobile sports apps, live feedback tools — are identical to those Bucheon-area young fans use to follow their clubs, understand formations, track match statistics, or learn the rules of competitions they are newly following.
As covered in how Korean Generation Z sports fans engage differently with digital media based on their literacy level, the way a young fan navigates a live match app or interprets a post-match data breakdown is not just a matter of interest — it is shaped by the underlying capability they bring to that interaction.
A high-literacy Gen Z fan watching a K League 1 analysis video on YouTube is more likely to use comment sections, follow recommended follow-up content, engage with coaching breakdowns, and cross-reference what they see with other sources. A low-literacy peer watching the exact same video may process it more passively, take longer to build understanding, and be less likely to use the platform’s feedback mechanisms to deepen their knowledge.
The content is the same. The experience is not.
The Assumption Worth Reconsidering
One of the more useful contributions of the Kyung Hee study is that it directly addresses what the researchers call intra-generational variation. The phrase “digital native” — commonly applied to Generation Z — implies a level of digital fluency that research consistently fails to support uniformly. Being born into a digitally connected environment does not guarantee the competency to extract meaning from it effectively.
This is particularly relevant in a sports context because sports content has become dramatically more layered. Watching Bucheon FC 1995’s first season in K League 1 involves navigating club social media, understanding the split system and its implications for standings, reading expected goals metrics that appear in broadcast graphics, and interpreting tactical analysis content that has become standard across YouTube channels dedicated to Korean football. Each of these activities carries a different literacy demand.
The practical implication is not that lower-literacy fans are less capable of enjoying sport — they are not. It is that content creators, sports educators, and community organizers who assume all young fans engage from the same digital baseline will underserve a meaningful portion of their audience without ever knowing they are doing so.
Building Better Foundations
The Kyung Hee researchers recommended that sports learning programs — and by extension any sports content environment aimed at young audiences — be designed with literacy variation in mind. This means structuring content to support multiple entry points: plain-language explanations alongside statistical breakdowns, visual guides alongside text-heavy analysis, and community touchpoints that allow lower-literacy users to ask questions without friction.
For Bucheon’s growing supporter base, many of whom are encountering K League 1 football for the first time this season, this is a directly applicable insight. The gap between owning a smartphone and being able to use it to build genuine sports knowledge is real, measurable, and matters for how clubs, media organizations, and community groups design the content environments they create.