North Korea World Cup Team Profile

May 27th, 2010 | by: chris | View Comments

As most know, North Korea isn’t exactly the most social of nations, therefore they, and relevantly their football team, is a bit of a mystery. What we do know, however, is awesome. And if it isn’t, they’ll still tell us it is.

FIFA drew both North and South Korea into the same qualifying group just because they were feeling frisky. The first game was forced to China because the North would not allow either the South Korean anthem or their flags at their home leg; they then accused South Korea of poisoning their players after losing in Seoul in the second leg.

Since then they’ve just decided not to show for a friendly against Oman, lost their strips during a flight to Venezuela for friendlies, forcing them to wear Venezuela’s away kit for the game, and stood tall as the only nation to name a flat 23 players with no replacements from the go.

Oh yeah, this should be great.


Nickname: North Korea, Those Guys From ‘66

FIFA World Ranking as of May 26th 2010: 105th

Group G Matches:

Brazil v North Korea, June 15th, 8:30p, Johannesburg
Portugal v North Korea, June 21st, 1:30, Cape Town
North Korea v Ivory Coast, June 25th, 4p, Nelspruit

Buy your North Korea tickets here.

Kit: True to form, North Korea has not released its kits yet.

Coach: Kim Jong-Hun. Hun, just like everything surrounding the squad, is a bit of mystery. What we do know is he is not immune to the wave of delusional goals sweeping across Asian football coaches.

“I believe we will at least pass the first round,” Kim told the Yonhap News agency. “We have the strong spirit of challenge to upset expectations.

And from this we can also decipher he hasn’t yet been informed of his group mates. That’s two (!) things. Move over Wikipedia, here we come.

Key Players: The problem with knowledge about North Korean teams is that a) Asian qualifying and friendlies get very little global pub and b) twenty of the twenty-three play in the North Korean league, which is surely awesome, and even if it isn’t, it is.

Therefore North Korea have three key players. Who? You guessed it.

Ahn Young-Hak, one of the Japanese born, a defensive midfielder; Hong Yong-Jo, a forward playing for Rostov in Russia; and there’s the Japanese-born star, Jong Tae-Se, one of the best forwards in the J-League and North Korea’s best hope for any goals in South Africa.

Which will be a big surprise since there are also rumors they will run out a 5-4-1. They’ll have to, won’t they?

(There’s also Ri Myong Guk, the keeper, who was nominated for Asian Footballer of the Year.)

Player with best YouTube video: Jong! Chong! Jong!

Player with best name: Yeah, it’s a bit of a toss-up, so we’ll use this as an escuse to sneak this quote from Ri Myong-Guk in:

He played 15 matches in 2010 World Cup qualifying for Korea DPR, including keeping a clean sheet in the decisive final group game against Saudi Arabia. After the match, he stated “I felt like I was defending the gateway to my motherland”.

Oh really.

Player with best nickname: Jong Tae-Se – The Asian Wayne Rooney. And since there’s no “Asian Lionel Messsi” quite as prominent, this might make Jong – known as Chong Tese in Japan – the best player in Asia by comparison.

Yes, it’s flawed logic. No, we don’t care.

Qualification: North Korea started way down at the bottom of the pyramid, thumping Mongolia, who export phenomenal sumo wrestlers, which can’t be good for its football program. Through controversy and more controversy, they qualified by the skin of their teeth way up in round 4 with a final game nil-nil draw against Saudi Arabia, thus bumping them through to the finals on goal difference.

Interesting: Six players on the team come from a North Korean club named April 25. It has military roots, but every domestic league should have a club named after a date.

But what does April 25 do when they lose on April 25th? (Oh. They don’t.)

National Anthem: “Aegukka” (”The Patriotic Song”)

World Cup History:

Expectations: Everybody, including us, expects them to get absolutely buried to within an inch of their footballing lives by everyone in their group.

Squad: North Korea World Cup squad.

Blog: Alan has an ear to the ground over at the North Korea World Cup Blog.

- More World Cup 2010 Team Profiles.