{"id":23730,"date":"2026-05-20T11:37:36","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T11:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/23730\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T11:37:36","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T11:37:36","slug":"north-korean-womens-soccer-team-arrives-in-south-korea-for-regional-tournament-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/23730\/","title":{"rendered":"North Korean women’s soccer team arrives in South Korea for regional tournament"},"content":{"rendered":"

SEOUL, South Korea \u2014 A North Korean women’s soccer team<\/a> arrived in South Korea on Sunday to compete in a regional tournament, the first visit by North Korean athletes in eight years amid political tensions between the two nations.<\/p>\n

A total of 39 players and staff with North Korea’s Naegohyang Women’s FC arrived at Incheon International Airport, just west of Seoul, aboard a plane from China. They didn’t make any comments, though some activists shouted “Welcome! Welcome!” and citizens used their mobile phones to film their arrival.<\/p>\n

The North Korean team will face South Korea’s Suwon FC Women on Wednesday in the semifinals of the Asian Football Confederation Women’s Champions League in Suwon, a city south of Seoul.<\/p>\n

The two Koreas have occasionally used sports events<\/a> to create feel-good moments when relations were amicable. But the latest soccer event won’t likely signal any thaw in their long-strained ties, with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un<\/a> maintaining his confrontational stance<\/a> against South Korea.<\/p>\n

“We should be cautious about interpreting their visit to South Korea as a sign of an improvement in South-North relations,” Lee Wootae, a senior research fellow at Seoul’s Korea Institute for National Unification, said in a recent report. “It would be more accurate to view this as a limited South-North Korean contact within the framework of international sports.”<\/p>\n

In recent years, Kim has repeatedly called South Korea his country’s principal enemy and taken steps to eliminate the idea of shared statehood and establish a hostile “two-state” system<\/a> on the Korean Peninsula. Observers say such a move likely stems from Kim’s wariness of South Korea’s cultural influence and his purported perception that South Korea is no longer useful in dealings with the U.S.<\/p>\n

North Korea last sent its athletes to South Korea in December 2018 for a table tennis event. At the time, North and South Korea were engaged in a flurry of exchange and cooperation programs<\/a> following the North’s participation in the Pyeongchang Olympics<\/a> in South Korea earlier in 2018.<\/p>\n

The brief period of inter-Korean detente came to an end after a U.S.-led diplomacy<\/a> on ending North Korea’s nuclear program collapsed in 2019 due to disputes over international sanctions on the North. North Korea has since performed a provocative run of weapons tests to expand its nuclear arsenal and rebuffed South Korean and U.S. offers to restore diplomacy.<\/p>\n

South Korea’s current liberal government, led by President Lee Jae Myung,<\/a> espouses rapprochement with North Korea. The government said it will provide financial support to civic groups planning to organize a 3,000-member squad to cheer for both North and South Korean teams at Wednesday’s match.<\/p>\n

“We will enthusiastically cheer for them by chanting the names of both teams and their players, while faithfully adhering to AFC guidelines,” the civic groups said in a joint statement.<\/p>\n

North Korea is a powerhouse in women’s soccer, particularly at the youth level. It has won the Under-17 Women’s World Cup four times and the Under-20 Women’s World Cup three times. Naegohyang Women’s FC defeated Suwon FC Women 3-0 in the group stage in Myanmar last November.<\/p>\n

Melbourne City FC and Tokyo Verdy Beleza are to face off in the other semifinal on Wednesday. The final is set for Saturday at a stadium in Suwon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEOUL, South Korea \u2014 A North Korean women’s soccer team arrived in South Korea on Sunday to compete…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23731,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[11441,16233,16234,2285,602,31,16236,154,34,414,1049,16235,1583,5192,13216,11816,16232],"class_list":["post-23730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-north-korea","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-jobs","tag-korea","tag-local","tag-news","tag-north-korea","tag-politics","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}