They’re coming for you. They’re coming for you. North Korea’s women’s football age-group pathway teams, they’re coming for. Well, pretty much anyone in their way, it seems, after the weekend.
As elite club football pored in microscopic detail over the fallout from events at the Etihad Stadium on Sunday evening, something remarkable, if a little less advertised, was happening in Bogotá. Three days on from the final of the Fifa women’s under‑20 World Cup final, it is worth scrolling back over the full sweep of North Korea’s run to that point, which reached its glorious end note on Sunday night, and in the process opened a new angle on any reasonable assessment of the team performance of the season.
The Chollima (nickname explanation: indestructible mythic winged horse) arrived in Colombia in August with a 21-women squad drawn from six domestic teams. The league is hugely popular back home, but these are essentially players unknown to the rest of the world.
They kicked off on 2 September with a 6-2 thrashing of Argentina in Cali. Three days later they beat Costa Rica 9-0 in a game that featured eight goalscorers. Three days after that North Korea put away the Netherlands 2-0 to seal top spot in the group.
The knockout phase began with a 5-2 cuffing aside of Austria. And from there North Korea’s endgame was pretty much perfect, with victories against Brazil (senior world ranking: No 8), the USA (No 1) and Japan (No 7), all without conceding a goal. End result: played seven, won seven, aggregate score 25-4.
They did it brilliantly too, producing, from the TV footage, a whirl of interplay and high-class finishing. Even the winner in the final was a beauty, scored by Choe Il-son, the hyper-talented 17-year-old cutting inside on the right, gliding past a defender, then shooting left‑footed into the roof of the net via a deflection.
Choe might have had a hat-trick on the day and looks an awesome prospect, scooting about like a combination of teenage Wayne Rooney and teenage Michael Owen, all fearlessly clever direct running, a rogue state Endrick. It is hard to imagine there is a better 17-year-old anywhere.
Back home, Choe plays for Pyongyang’s April 25 National Defence Sports Club. She will now disappear behind the veil, away from international competition. But not just yet. She is also eligible for the under-17 World Cup next month in the Dominican Republic (birth date, 1 January 2007; cut-off date, also 1 January 2007), where North Korea’s re-emergent women have a chance to make it a clean sweep of the Fifa age groups, including a 23 October meeting with England, who are presumably already all over the footage of what awaits them.
It is important to stress that the success of North Korea’s age-group teams will only be surprising to those who haven’t been following the run of things. North Korea has long been a force in women’s football, the players cloistered outside competition, but the senior team rarely out of the top end of the rankings over the past 20 years.
But for the neutral, watching this was also a reminder of that most cliched and degraded of notions – sport’s ability to surprise and dissolve preconceptions. It’s North Korea, dude. How do you expect them to play? Tireless robot-pressing? A kind of unsmiling insect football enacted for the love of Dear Leader?
In practice the North Korean style was energetic and high pressure, but also free, creative and fun, all inventive high-speed combinations. The players were engaging and a joy to watch. When Choe missed a chance in the opening minutes of the final there was a lovely moment as Sin Hyang, her attacking partner, ran across to hug her and ruffle her hair like an elder sibling, which certainly makes a change from a sulky arms‑wide gesture and moaning to the bench about not getting a pass.
But what about the shadowy team staff? The propaganda merchants in the background? Yes, a Wikipedia click does suggest the women’s senior team manager appears to have repeatedly threatened America with nuclear war – “its cities will be transformed into towering infernos” – but wait, it’s a faulty link. This is in fact a different Kim Myong-chol, not the well-known state propagandist but the 39-year-old ex-footballer of the same name, who didn’t actually say any of that. Phew. Close one, the internet!
More widely, women’s football in North Korea is a fascinating story. The tale has been told often of party officials returning with an outreach plan from the 1986 Fifa summit where the Norwegian delegate, Ellen Wille, literally screamed on stage in frustration, demanding a proper women’s World Cup.
Seeing an opportunity, the regime instigated football in schools and villages and created a national league where players were given accommodation and employment in the capital. Success followed. North Korea won the Asian Cup in 2001, 2003 and 2008.
Then came the great interruption. In 2011 five national‑team players tested positive for a rare steroid. The excuse offered was the use of a traditional medicine made from the glands of a musk deer, applied after the players were struck by lightning. Oddly enough, Fifa didn’t buy this and North Korea were banned from the 2015 World Cup, lost their ranking position, failed to qualify in 2019 partly as a result, then went into major isolation during the pandemic, re-emerging only towards the end of 2023.
As a result, this is more or less an entirely new generation, reared in isolation. Naturally, given the history, given the lack of contact, there will be some eyebrow‑raising over their startling degree of effervescence. But it is also an exciting notion, something that speaks to a long distant past, before total knowledge and access, when sport was a large, atomised place, when teams, athletes and ways of playing would emerge only through the cycle of international tournaments.
The evidence of Colombia is that North Korea have something that looks, with the benefit of the surprise element, like a golden generation. Next month will be another showcase for a group of players who mature around the next senior World Cup in Brazil in three years’ time. So much can happen before then, but it is an exciting element. Can you imagine the sheer, cinematic difficulty for Fifa, for its corporate handshakers, for the flag-obsessed US elements, of processing a North Korean win?
Colombia may not have offered any real insight into the world’s most opaque nation state. But sport does have the power to make human connections, and this is at the very least a window into something else beyond the stories of dictatorial oppression and poverty. Plus, if there’s any chance at all of seeing Choe in Europe, can someone out there please get on the blower to Pyongyang and rustle up a little tiki-taka diplomacy.