Suwon Bluewings trophies: the full honours list, from the K League to the Asian Club Championship

Domestic honours: the K League and the FA Cup

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The four K League championships come in two pairs, 1998–1999 and 2004–2008, and the FA Cup record is the one that kept going longest: five wins spread from 2002 to 2019, which is also the last of the Suwon Bluewings trophies to date. The League Cup total of six includes two separate competitions won in the same 1999 season, the Adidas Cup and the Daehan Fire Insurance Cup, which is why some lists show five and others six.

The Asian Club Championship, twice

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Back-to-back Asian Club Championships put the club in a small group of Asian sides to have retained the continental title, and each was followed by the Asian Super Cup against the winners of the Asian Cup Winners' Cup. Under the AFC Champions League format that replaced those competitions, the best run was the 2011 semi-final.

Why the League Cup total is argued about

The Korean League Cup was not one competition with one name. For much of its existence it ran under whichever sponsor held it, which is how a single 1999 season produced two of them: the Adidas Cup and the Daehan Fire Insurance Cup, both won by Suwon, the second usually listed as a supplementary competition. Count them as two wins and the League Cup total is six and the club total is twenty-four. Count them as one competition and you get five and twenty-three. This page counts them separately, and says so, because both were played and both were won.

The same habit explains why older summaries of the Suwon Bluewings honours disagree with each other by one or two. Nothing was added or lost; the competitions were renamed underneath the totals.

Three of these competitions no longer exist

Two of the continental honours are from a structure that has since been dismantled. The Asian Club Championship was the continent's premier club competition until it was folded into the AFC Champions League, and the Asian Super Cup was the match between its winner and the winner of the Asian Cup Winners' Cup, which is why Suwon played one in each of 2001 and 2002 and never again. The A3 Champions Cup, won in 2005, was a short-lived tournament between the champion clubs of Korea, Japan and China.

The Pan-Pacific Championship of 2009 was a pre-season invitational, and it is the honour most often left off lists of the Suwon Bluewings trophies. It was won on penalties against Los Angeles Galaxy, which is a reasonable argument for keeping it on.

The finals that decided them

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The 2002 final is the one that reads oddly at this distance: an Asian championship decided between two Korean clubs, and the opponent, Anyang LG Cheetahs, is the club that became FC Seoul two years later.

What the shape of the list tells you

Read down the years rather than across the competitions and the record separates into two bursts. The first, from 1998 to 2002, is the one that made the club's reputation: two K League championships, the four-trophy 1999, and then both Asian Club Championships with an Asian Super Cup attached to each. Five seasons, eleven trophies. The second, from 2008 to 2010, is narrower but broader in kind: a league title, two Korean FA Cups, a League Cup and the Pan-Pacific Championship.

Between and after them the FA Cup is what kept the list moving. Its five wins span 2002 to 2019, seventeen years, and three of them came after the last league title. That is the competition this club has been most consistently dangerous in, and it is the one that a second-division side can still enter on level terms, since the Korean FA Cup takes clubs from across the pyramid.

The one honour with no trophy attached is worth listing anyway: the 2011 AFC Champions League semi-final, the club's best run under the format that replaced the competitions it had won a decade earlier.