It was over seemingly before it began. The ferocious and fearless North Koreans pounced on every loose ball and ran out to a 3-0 lead before halftime. The goals themselves were amateurish at best, emblematic of a supremely confident squad taking on an overwhelmed opponent who was truly out of its depth. The Dutch conceded via the failure to clear a looping ball, then by turning over deep in their own territory, and finally by playing an underhit backpass, which was gobbled up by North Korea’s Pak Rye-Yong.

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Star 16-year-old striker Yu Jong-hyang took home the Golden Ball award for best player of the tournament, and bagged the Golden Boot for her eight goals in the competition.

Following the match, Dutch coach Olivier Amelink was magnanimous, telling FIFA.com, “I don’t think we could have beaten them. I think the gap between Korea DPR and us is simply too big to compete with them at the moment.”

The tournament in Morocco was the fourth edition of the Women’s U-17 World Cup, won by the DPRK for the second time in as many years. It is the most successful team in the history of the competition, but the fireworks don’t end with that age group. The North Korea Women’s U-20 team has won the World Cup three times, most recently in 2024, with victories over traditional powerhouses the United States, Japan, and Brazil en route.

Pyongyang Academy

The crown jewel of the North Korean sporting establishment is the Pyongyang International Football Academy. Opened in 2012, the academy is a sprawling three-acre modern soccer training facility located just to the southwest of the national team’s home, May Day Stadium, in the heart of Pyongyang.

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The school boasts around 200 players between the ages of 7 and 17. They are identified by a massive, nationwide scouting network that brings the most talented youngsters and their families to the capital to undergo intense schooling and soccer training. This opportunity represents a sort of upward mobility for rural families, as life in the North Korean capital is described as far more pleasant than the far-flung agrarian lifestyle.

This state-level sporting investment can actually be traced back to the late North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, who, in the 1980s, served as a sort of cultural decision maker in his father’s government. He tried his hand at everything, from filmmaking to music to sports. In 1985, the Kim family announced a program of state investment in women’s soccer, surprising many since the sport had been played exclusively by North Korean men up to that point.

Some assert that the burgeoning world of women’s sports had a lower barrier to entry than men’s sports and would be a field rich with propagandizing victories over Western rivals. This investment led little by little to a formalization of women’s sports in the country, organized under the banner of the central government in Pyongyang, which went on to found various high-level sporting academies that served a singular purpose: to create generations of high-performance athletes to be trotted out as proof of communist exceptionalism.

The Pyongyang Academy and North Korea’s investment in women’s sports can be seen as an early and prominent form of the practice that has been so prevalent in recent years: sportswashing. Currently, it’s a bevy of Persian Gulf oil states using massive investment in sports as a vehicle for rehabilitating their public image. FIFA and its cadre of satellite federations have only been too happy to accept their tainted lucre.

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At least the DPRK is claiming to educate its athletes! The North Korean state assures us that the education their players receive at the Pyongyang Academy is well-rounded. According to the DPRK’s official website, “Football players should be prepared physically and technically. However, they can achieve deserved results only when they are supported by independent judgment and other creative thoughts. A future football ace is among those who can anticipate two or more through the one taught by teachers and get into action promptly.”

Critics will point out the irony of a dictatorial, homogenous regime ostensibly emphasizing the importance of creativity and self-expression. Conversely, the militaristic training and overtly nationalistic environment of the Pyongyang Academy are common explanations for the domination of the North Korean youth teams. How, we wonder, can Western, African, or Middle Eastern teams compete with heavy-handed state control of the entire sporting establishment?

Young players in, for lack of a better term, capitalist countries are actually taught the value of expression and individualism on the pitch; it’s not just lip service. They aren’t, like the North Koreans, subjected to intense physical training that would make GI Jane sick to her stomach. Young Dutch, American, or English women aren’t subject to punishment at the hands of their own government if they fail to perform well in international competition.

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Some will point out that North Korea in international competition plays not only for individual glory or the success of a nation, but as a reflection of their entire communist existence, as a proof of concept of a social and economic organization that most of the rest of the world has eschewed. Is it possible that 16-year-olds have so enthusiastically internalized this struggle?

What’s worse, some outside critics have even levied accusations of gender-based cheating at the North Korean teams, asserting that some of their young women might, in fact, be young men.

It’s important to note that none of these accusations come with much merit. Although rumors circulated following the men’s disastrous 2010 World Cup campaign that various players and coaches had been thrown in re-education camps. These reports are dubious, with none of the major news outlets able to corroborate these sensational detentions. There were confirmed “criticism sessions” carried out at which players and coaches were made to explain publicly the reasons for their failure. But hey, does that really sound much worse than a press conference with British media?

As far as the gender thing is concerned, I don’t think anyone has offered much in the way of evidence other than the young North Korean women having short haircuts.

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This is certainly not meant to exonerate the oftentimes cruel and draconian North Korea regime. The DPRK has a long history of sporting crimes, principally maltreatment of athletes and doping. What seems a bridge too far, however, is devaluing the success of these teams because of the society in which they live, or using their particular way of life as a cheap explanation for their being very, very good at soccer. “Of course they’re good at soccer!” a critic might charge. “Their government will kill them if they’re not!”

It’s hard to watch the DPRK women’s youth teams play and overlay a collective fear of state retribution. Their play is not particularly rigid or drilled, and occasionally includes a type of flair and creativity that wouldn’t look out of place on the beaches of Copacabana. Upon scoring their myriad goals at this year’s U-17 Women’s World Cup, none of the North Korean players’ faces betrayed any sense of relief, but instead highlighted a heightened camaraderie and belief among the team. This is to say, it’s entirely possible that these young women are supremely talented, have a deep, abiding passion for the game of soccer, and just happen to live in a cloistered communist dystopia. Multiple things can be true.

What’s Next?

In the modern geopolitical climate, North Korean players are severely limited in terms of their soccer development.

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Before the pandemic, there was a smattering of male players from the DPRK who managed to make their marks in European club football. Notably, Han Kwang-song played for Cagliari in Serie A and became the first-ever Asian player to appear on the bench for Juventus, but had his European career prematurely shuttered by United Nations sanctions that prevented North Koreans from living and working abroad in response to Pyongyang’s insistence on pursuing its renegade nuclear weapons program.

Photo by Emilio Andreoli/Getty Images

Han reportedly spent two to three years trapped at North Korea’s embassy in China during the COVID-19 pandemic, unable to return to his home country due to travel restrictions. He finally returned to action on the pitch for April 25 Sports Club, a team based in Pyongyang, in 2023.

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This is a possible explanation for why the women’s team has been, as of yet, unable to repeat their youth success at the senior level. Players are limited in terms of moving abroad to foreign clubs because of international work restrictions. They also lack any sort of mechanism for receiving their salaries; any money players earn would be funneled directly to the North Korean state, which, in legalese, would amount to any foreign club funding “state terrorism.”

The litany of international sanctions levied against North Korea has rendered the nation unable to continue its upward trajectory in the world of international soccer. For talented North Korean women like Kim Phyong-hwa and Choe Il-son to make moves to major European or American clubs, the North Korean regime would have to make major diplomatic inroads, submitting to heretofore untenable processes like nuclear weapons and human rights inspections. That is why, as of this writing, each and every player representing North Korea on the men’s and women’s national teams plays their club football domestically.

The team is also limited in terms of opponents. The North Korean federation withdrew from men’s World Cup qualifying for 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and did not return to international competition until 2023. The women’s team similarly retreated from international play until recently. The country also suffers from a lack of willing opponents for FIFA friendly windows, and this past year, the men’s side was forced to play a series of friendlies against lower-division Russian clubs.

This came after the great shame of the North Korean women being banned from participation in the 2015 Women’s World Cup. Multiple DPRK players tested positive for prohibited substances at the 2011 Women’s World Cup after FIFA blanket-tested the entire squad. The North Korean federation came out with an absolute banger of an explanation for the test results, claiming that the banned substance in question was actually a traditional Chinese medicine derived from deer musk, used to treat people who have been struck by lightning. FIFA fined the North Koreans $400,000 and effectively cast them into the international soccer doldrums for an entire generation.

But if the North Korean women continue their success at the senior level at the 2027 Women’s World Cup in Brazil, the team’s immensely talented individual players will be impossible to ignore. It won Group H in the first round of Asian qualifying for the tournament, boasting a plus-26 differential after only three games. The 2026 Women’s Asian Cup actually serves as the final round of qualifying for the federation, with all semifinalists automatically qualifying and quarterfinal teams going into a playoff for the final two spots.

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International tournaments have always served as a springboard to high-profile moves at the club level, and it would come as no great surprise to see some intrepid European or American club seek to entice the regime with an irresistible offer.

What comes next is the purview of political scientists and analysts the world over. Will the DPRK regime decide that sports continue to be a low-cost way to showcase the exceptionality of its communist regime? Or will relations continue to freeze over with the rest of the world, condemning a golden generation of nascent North Korean superstars to stagnate in an unholy footballing purgatory?

The North Korean women will almost certainly line up at the next World Cup in 18 months’ time. It’s a safe bet that no one will want to play them. We can only hope that, from a soccer perspective, its brightest young stars are allowed to shine.