North Korea: world’s most secretive nation lands in spotlight at Women’s Asian Cup | Samantha Lewis | OneFootball

In 1986, when Norwegian delegate Ellen Wille stood on stage at Fifa’s annual congress in Mexico and demanded the creation of a World Cup for women, it sparked support from one of the room’s unlikeliest allies. Delegates from North Korea, so the story goes, were inspired by Wille’s speech and returned to Pyongyang with a plan: to use women’s football as a tool to reassert their collapsing power on the world stage.

The plan was simple: starting in the late 1980s, the government would invest heavily in the women’s game, inserting football programs into school curriculums, establishing women’s teams in the military where players trained full-time, creating youth talent identification pathways, and constructing brand-new facilities across the country.

As the nation became politically isolated, sport emerged as one of the only avenues through which North Korea could compete – and even succeed – internationally. So under Kim Jong-il, reportedly a football fan, the women’s game became a proxy platform for spreading North Korea’s political agenda.

That is what makes the nation’s progress at the upcoming Women’s Asian Cup, starting with their opening game against Uzbekistan on 3 March in Sydney’s west, all the more intriguing.

The three-time champions have not participated in the tournament since losing the final to Australia in 2010, after which they all but disappeared from global competition. But North Korea is now back, invigorated by a new generation of youth World Cup winners, and hoping to return to the summit of Asian football.

North Korea’s women’s national team debuted in 1989, two years before their nearest and biggest ally China – who they will meet in the final Group B match on 9 March – was due to host the first ever Women’s World Cup in 1991.

Following in the footsteps of their communist cousins, who had similarly invested in women’s football as a geopolitical tool and became one of the sport’s powerhouse nations as a result, North Korea’s autocratic government saw an opportunity to stretch and strengthen their international profile as more traditional avenues of political influence collapsed.

“Due to North Korea’s political isolation, women’s football is one of the very few areas in which the country can display excellence to international audiences,” wrote Jung Woo Lee, a senior lecturer in sport and leisure policy at the University of Edinburgh. “Understandably, the footballing triumph offers the North Korean regime an effective means of political propaganda to convey its exclusive nationalism and fortify its authoritarian domination.”

The missing decade

The government’s early investment into women’s football paid off almost immediately. From the mid-1990s to the 2010s, North Korea became one of Asia’s most dominant women’s national teams, winning three Asian Cup titles between 2001 and 2008, and even more minor trophies across the continent.

Tens of thousands of people would attend their home games – at venues such as the 150,000-seater Rungrado 1st of May Stadium – at a time when crowds were minuscule elsewhere in the world, with state departments developing stamps, posters, and even a multi-part television drama series about women footballers to inspire the nation.

In exchange for success, players were gifted apartments, controlled travel opportunities, public celebrations, and residence certificates for themselves and their families in Pyongyang, where the living standards remain far superior than in the countryside.

The experiences of some of these players were captured in a groundbreaking 2008 documentary, Hana, dul, sed, which follows four women “during their active careers and after retirement, unobtrusively observing their everyday lives against the backdrop of bombastic monuments and solemn gestures in this communist hermit state”.

But in 2011, the team’s global momentum screeched to a halt. Five players tested positive for a banned steroid at the Women’s World Cup in Germany. North Korea denied wrongdoing, claiming the players had been given a natural substance derived from musk deer glands after the players had been struck by lightning.

Fifa rejected their bizarre explanation and issued a four-year ban, meaning they missed the 2015 edition. North Korea subsequently failed to qualify for the 2018 Asian Cup and 2019 World Cup, while pandemic lockdowns saw them withdraw from both tournaments in 2022 and 2023.

As a result, the senior women’s team have been largely absent from international competitions for over a decade (though have mysteriously kept their global top 10 ranking), with economic sanctions making it nearly impossible for individual players to sign contracts overseas.

But even with their senior team in stasis, North Korea’s long-term plan has continued to pay off. Thanks to their decades-long investment in women’s football, particularly the opening of the Pyongyang International Football School in 2013, the nation’s youth teams are experiencing a second wave of success.

The first generation of graduates from that school are the reigning Under-17 and Under-20 Women’s World Cup and Asian Cup champions, making North Korea the most successful national team across all youth tournaments (14 titles, including four trophies in the past two years).

The Asian Cup, which kicks off on Sunday in Perth, may be too soon to see young stars like Yu Jong-hyang, Choe Il-son, Jon Il-chong and Chae Un-gyong shine. But it will be the best glimpse yet of whether this old, unlikely superpower of women’s football is rumbling back to life.

Header image: [Photograph: Kim Won-Jin/AFP/Getty Images]