WEEKEND COLUMNISTS North Korea’s football manager, wearing a badge of the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il on his plain blue suit, sat on a bar stool in the French provinces and proclaimed: “We’d like to surprise the world.” In truth, North Korea already has. In Le Mans this week the hermit kingdom played its first international football match in Europe since 1966. The country has not engaged this much with the world since endorsing John Kerry for American president in 2004. In football if nowhere else, North Korea is embracing globalisation.
The world’s most isolated state wants to learn international football fast. It has qualified for the World Cup of 2010, the first time it has reached the tournament since England in 1966. Back then 11 little North Korean army officers beat Italy – prompting Italian fans to pelt their team with tomatoes – and went 3-0 up against Portugal before conceding five. Their hosts, the people of Middlesbrough, fell in love with them.
North Korean football then disappeared from sight for decades, but the North Koreans stuck with it. They do not have many other hobbies. They watched pirated footage of distant World Cups and cheered on South Korea and their own national teams – women’s and men’s – with approximately equal fervour. “They’re football-mad. Even Beckham is known in North Korea,” says Nick Bonner, a Briton who leads tours to Pyongyang and made a documentary film about the 1966 team, The Game of Their Lives. It is no coincidence that when Kim reappeared in public after a rumoured stroke, he did so at a football match.
The national team is possibly North Korea’s most globalised institution, as it includes some Japanese-born North Koreans and a man who plays in Russia. However, it is still pretty insular. The North Koreans know they must mug up on foreign football or risk looking silly at the World Cup. “I don’t know of any nation more concerned with pride,” says Bonner.
You can lob missiles at the world, but to win football matches you simply have to globalise. Yet North Korea struggles to find good sparring partners. Few foreign teams are itching to visit Pyongyang. So the Koreans hired France’s Sports Live Agency, which organised last week’s tour. They also appear to have asked the Swede Sven Goran Eriksson to manage them, but he said no.
It was a strange scene in Le Mans on Tuesday: two troubled nations, North Korea and Congo Brazzaville, playing a friendly match in one of France’s sadder towns, watched by a few hundred cold spectators. The Congolese fans danced and sang. The North Korean delegation did not. Their players looked fragile beside the Congolese. They also appeared to have dismissed goal-scoring as bourgeois individualism. However, each player had collectivist discipline and a wonderful touch. In short, they looked like South Korea without the muscle. They drew 0-0, the same score as their earlier friendly against FC Nantes, gave little bows to their manager Kim Jong Hun and walked off.
“We are sorry we didn’t score any goals here,” said Kim afterwards. By North Korean standards, this was glasnost. When the team landed in France last week, they had rejected almost all questions but in Le Mans, the manager unwound. He told us about taking his players to see Bonner’s film about 1966 in a French cinema. Admittedly, the screeners had fast-forwarded through some sensitive bits, but the players were inspired. “Everyone knows we surprised the world in 1966,” Kim (or at least his interpreter) said. “We’d like to do it better in the World Cup. We’d like to show the world the spirit of the Korean people.”
The team tours southern Africa soon and plans to return to Europe next spring. Meanwhile, for anyone without tickets for the World Cup, Bonner has a suggestion. Next June he is leading a tour of football fans to North Korea. “It’s the only other place to watch the World Cup, really,” he explains.
