A History Of Korean Football

- by Mark Trevena -

Montevideo is probably not the first place your modern football fan would look to for the birth of a huge sporting phenomenon, yet in the summer of 1930, both France & Mexico and the USA & Belgium had the distinction of visiting the Uruguayan capital and simultaneously playing out the opening matches of the first World Cup tournament. Since those opening games in Uruguay, thirteen more countries have held the honour of hosting the opening match of a World Cup finals tournament. Most of those countries were reasonably strong footballing nations – Italy, Brazil, West Germany, Spain and Mexico amongst others having constantly been in the higher echelons of the world game. Even some of the lesser footballing countries to have hosted the tournament (Switzerland, Chile, the USA) had a long-established football tradition.

So when the decision was made on 31st May 1996 to change the FIFA statutes to allow for co-hosting of the competition and the subsequent 1st July vote to select Japan and South Korea as dual hosts of the 2002 World Cup tournament, the footballing world raised its collective eyebrow. At the time of the vote, professional football had only been played on an organized league basis in the Far East for thirteen years. The South Koreans had previously qualified for four World Cup tournaments, the Japanese hadn't even managed one. South Korea had never won a match in any of their tournament participations, and indeed had been on the receiving end of some of the tournament's record defeats, conceding nine and seven goals respectively without reply against Hungary and Turkey back in 1954.

From an outsider's point of view, it seemed a strange decision – why select two countries with apparently very little football tradition and international success to host the world's premier football tournament? From a cynic's point of view, it was a decision purely motivated by money – drop some of the world's biggest football stars on the Far East doorstep for one month and watch the cash roll in.

However, the story of football in Korea doesn't begin with the K-league and end with the 2002 World Cup. One could argue that there has been a comparable footballing tradition akin to that of European countries alive on the peninsula long before these more modern events, and that the culmination of that tradition resulted in the co-hosting of the World Cup tournament.