The curious success story of North Korean women’s football

Little, if anything, is known for certain about North Korea, probably the most secretive country in the world. All information that comes out of this Asian territory is surrounded by an aura of distrust due to its possible propaganda distortion. The news that usually comes from the communist dictatorship is usually geopolitical, but in recent hours women’s football has done a great favor to the North Korean leaders, especially its supreme leader, as Kim Jong-Un calls himself. .

The women’s team, pride of the country, was proclaimed under-17 world champion in the Dominican Republic after beating Spain on penalties. Since its creation in 1987, the oriental azaleas, As they are nicknamed, they have also won throughout their short history three U-20 World Cups (2006, 2016 and 2024), three Asian Cups (2001, 2003 and 2008) and three golds in the Asian Games. A history of titles that is not the result of chance.

The women’s team, six-time world champion in youth categories, is the pride of the country

“Sport plays a very important role in the nation. Athletes must see their training as the Party’s orders of combat and their training camp as a battle to implement the Party’s ideas,” says a writing by Kim Jong-Un, discovered in the only bookstore in the country with copies in English by a foreign reporter Bleacher Report one of the few that has entered the country.

After the death of Kim Il-Sung in 1994, Kim Jong-Il, father of the current president, took the reins of the country and opted for sports as an instrument to enhance the benefits of North Korea. Football, already popular, became a core part of school education with the accession of Kim Jong-Un to the throne in 2012. Of all the disciplines, the State focused on women’s football, a sector to be developed in the that North Korean women could establish themselves as world leaders. Especially in the lower categories, where the gap with the West was shorter. Furthermore, while in most countries soccer is about learning and fun at those ages, in the Asian country training is similar to army discipline. The uniformity in the hairstyle of the players who defeated Spain, all with short hair, is an example of the military character.

The reward for this demand is titles in the field and privileged treatment in society for the champions, who are revered as heroines. There are even movies explaining his exploits. Soccer also represents an opportunity for female players in a country where, according to the information that has emerged, there is a big difference between living in the capital and living in poverty in the countryside. A title can entail receiving the certificate to enter Pyongyang, necessary for every ordinary citizen, and gifts such as an apartment. Football can change your life.

But the successes of youth teams are largely failures in the senior team. The women’s team has participated in four World Cups (1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011), the quarterfinals of the event in China being its greatest achievement. Far from being remembered for its successes, the Asian team made headlines for the surreal doping tests of five players in the 2011 edition, which is why North Korea was excluded from the 2015 World Cup. Four banned steroids were detected and the North Korean federation alleged which came from a traditional Chinese medicine, extracted from the gland of a musk deer, which they had used to treat some of the nine players who were struck by lightning during training in the mountains of their country.

Doping in 2011, the only blot of a strategy that seeks to turn the country into a soccer power

It mattered little to the state machinery, which after the event, in 2013, redoubled its efforts with the creation of the Pyongyang International Football School, with 500 children to be distributed across 20 fields. The center, near the Primero de Mayo Stadium, theoretically the largest in the world with a capacity for 114,000 people, is fed by the 50 football schools from each of the provinces. The best come to Pyongyang and women reign in the capital, who since 2012 have played in mixed teams to help the boys improve. It is no coincidence that the men’s team is 111th in the world and the women’s team is ninth. A trend against the current of the rest of the world. Nothing new in North Korea.