This article provides a historical overview of the development of the Korean sports clubs. The Korean sports clubs are recently encouraging people to become involved in sports activities throughout their whole lifetime. These sports clubs are expected to play a vital role in solving societal issues, improving an elite athlete production system, and restoring local communities. Korean government-led measures have been taken for over 15 years to help meet these objectives. In spite of some positive outcomes, however, most of the programmes were considered somewhat fruitless in various ways. Overall, there have been policy inconsistencies among each programme, and the existence of the Korean sport clubs has depended heavily upon direct and indirect government funding. Along with the improvement of recurring problems, therefore, intangible values, such as autonomy and responsibility should be taken into consideration to achieve sustainable development of the Korean sports club system.