As the epidemic spreads, sporting events become less important but more important. On 17 May, FC Seoul played their first home game of the new K-League season.

The match was played in an empty stadium without spectators, which was, of course, one of the special measures taken during the epidemic to deal with the coronavirus. With empty stadiums being a rarity, the question of how to enhance the atmosphere at the game was inevitably faced, and so a very unbelievable scene emerged.

A company called Dalcom provided 30 mannequins, 28 of them female doll and two male love doll, to fill some of the empty seats in the stadium stands.

If they were just normal mannequins, they wouldn't have caused an outcry on the internet. Fans watching the game via live webcast noticed that some of the mannequins looked more like sex dolls and some were advertising restrictive websites, which eventually led to the club having to apologise on Instagram and Facebook.

Dalcom said the ads in question were from a sex toy company that took orders from Dalcom and they wanted to take some pictures of the mannequins before the game.

"They were supposed to take all the logos down before the start of the tournament," Cho Young-june, the head of Dalcom, told the BBC, "but a couple of headscarves and logos slipped through the cracks and stayed in the public eye. "

Lee Ji-hoon, an official from FC Seoul's publicity department, told the BBC that the club did not conduct a background check on Dalcom and did not realise beforehand that the company was running a sex paraphernalia industry.

The man in charge admitted that he thought the dolls looked "very much like real people" but said it never occurred to him that they might be sex toys, which, of course, ended with an apology and a fine for the club.

But whether they were "high-end mannequins" or so-called "sex dolls", these "spectators in the stands" were unprecedentedly special enough, even if we've seen too many of them in 2020! Even if we have already seen too many outrageous occurrences in 2020, it is still a shock to hear such news.

It's hard to know whether the future of 'sex dolls' will break new ground and whether they will be widely accepted for their diverse functions, but with the epidemic still spreading, it's fair to say that in FC Seoul's league matches, one dared to use and one dared to watch a 'sex doll' as a substitute spectator. But with the epidemic still spreading, the fact that the 'sex dolls' were standing in for the spectators in the FC Seoul league game was probably the most significant thing about the game.