This scout report was written at the end of January, a few days before Woon-Jin Choi made his transfer to Jeonbuk Hyundai from Incheon United.
Woo-Jin Choi is a 20-year-old South Korean left-back who plays for Incheon United in the K-League (Incheon was relegated to K2 after the 2024 season). Choi has just completed his first full season in the K-League and has 35 professional appearances so far in his career.
Choi is primarily an attacking full-back. He’s a strong playmaker from the left wing. He is good at finding the seams in opposing defences. I like that he’ll look to play a pass into the penalty box rather than just loft the ball in and hope for the best. In deeper areas, Choi is effective at linking up with teammates and getting through tight situations. He often attempts to play balls in behind from deeper areas. His hit rate on these balls is not particularly high, even considering the difficulty of this sort of pass, but they are valuable when they come off. Choi’s dribbling is fairly mediocre but he attempts to take players on so frequently that he manages to get into dangerous areas through dribbling with regularity. His first touch is very strong and he’s a comfortable ball carrier so he can attack space effectively but he’s a bit hit-and-miss as a 1v1 dribbler.
Choi’s defensive play is, unfortunately, quite a bit weaker than his attacking play. He defends quite aggressively but he’s not a very technical defender so he is bypassed quite frequently. Sometimes the aggressiveness does pay off but you can’t rely on him to lock down the left side. He’s listed as 5’7 (1.75M) which is not necessarily that short but he has a very slight build and loses most physical battles. His pace is ok. Choi can usually at least get back to put some pressure on players when the ball gets past him but he usually doesn’t have the gas to actually catch up with someone and win the ball back.
Despite some defensive frailties, Choi is playing a lot of minutes at a young age and doing a lot of useful things. So a step up is likely to come at some point. In the short term, Choi should move to a team that’s still in K1, ideally a team that will compete in the Asian Champions League. In the long term, a conference league-level team outside the top 5 leagues is probably a reasonable expectation for his career.
Target Scouting 