South Korean professional football team FC Seoul has apologised for filling their stadium with mannequins – which actually turned out to be sex dolls – as substitutes for fans during a match.

The K-League club said the dolls, which had been placed around stands currently off-limits to supporters due to the coronavirus outbreak, had been ordered inadvertently after a “misunderstanding” with the supplier.

But FC Seoul’s attempt to bring a touch of realism to Sunday’s match against Gwangju FC backfired after social media users noticed that the mannequins looked more like sex dolls.

“We would like to apologise to our fans. We’re genuinely sorry to our fans about the installation of the mannequins at our game on May 17,” FC Seoul said in a statement.

The statement added that the club had confirmed from the start that the mannequins they installed in the stands had no relation to the adult toys, even though they do indeed resemble real humans.

Earlier this month, the K-League became the first major football league to hold matches since the start of the pandemic, with the season’s opening game watched by a worldwide audience of fans starved of live football.

The club said it had been the victim of a mix-up, insisting it had checked with the supplier and received assurances that the dolls were not intended for sexual use.

Photographs taken at the largely empty stadium showed dolls spaced out among seats in front of life-size cardboard cutouts of the team’s players.

“Our intention was to do something lighthearted in these difficult times. We will think hard about what we need to do to ensure that something like this never happens again.”

The Sports Seoul website said that with so many football fans overseas now following K-League matches, there are concerns the incident will bring international disgrace.