A North Korean girls’s soccer membership will journey to South Korea this month, marking the primary go to by a northern sports activities delegation in practically eight years, at a time of near-total estrangement between the 2 Koreas.
Naegohyang Ladies’s FC, based mostly in North Korea’s capital Pyongyang, will face South Korea’s Suwon FC Ladies at Suwon sports activities advanced, on 20 Might for the semi-finals of the AFC Ladies’s Champions League.
South Korea’s soccer affiliation mentioned the Asian Soccer Confederation had confirmed Naegohyang’s participation on 1 Might. A delegation of 39, consisting of 27 gamers and 12 workers, is predicted to reach on 17 Might, in line with the unification ministry.
It will likely be the primary time a North Korean girls’s soccer crew has competed on southern soil for the reason that 2014 Incheon Asian Video games.
Additionally it is the primary go to by any North Korean sports activities delegation since December 2018, when a unified Korean desk tennis crew competed at a event in Incheon.
That got here on the tail finish of a short interval of inter-Korean sporting rapprochement that noticed the 2 Koreas march collectively below a unification flag on the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and area a joint girls’s ice hockey crew, alongside North Korean officers and cheering squads visiting the south.
The newest go to comes amid deep tensions and minimal contact between Seoul and Pyongyang.
South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, who took workplace in June 2025, has made reviving inter-Korean dialogue a central coverage objective.
In an handle marking liberation day final August, he mentioned: “South and North Korea are usually not enemies.” He additionally renounced any pursuit of unification by absorption, and pledged no hostile acts.
An official on the presidential workplace informed the Guardian the federal government welcomed Naegohyang’s participation within the event, including that it will work with the AFC and Suwon FC “to make sure that the crew can efficiently compete within the match”.
Pyongyang has given no public indication of a shift in place. In December 2023, Kim Jong-un redefined inter-Korean relations as these between “two hostile states” in a state of struggle, a formulation later mirrored in state coverage and reiterated as lately as March.
Shortly after Lee took workplace, Kim Yo-jong, a senior North Korean official and the chief’s highly effective sister, mentioned in a state media assertion that Pyongyang had “no curiosity” in dialogue no matter who led the south.
North Korea didn’t reply to an invite to the 2025 world archery championships in Gwangju and withdrew from the EAFF girls’s soccer championship hosted within the South final July.
North Korea’s girls’s soccer programme ranks among the many strongest within the area, eleventh on this planet, above Australia, China and South Korea.
Its youth groups have gained the Fifa under-17 girls’s World Cup a file 4 instances, together with in 2024 and 2025, and the under-20 equal 3 times. Naegohyang beat Suwon 3-0 within the group stage final November, in Myanmar.
The ultimate can be held on the similar venue on 23 Might.
