North Korean Women's Team to Play in South Korea for First Time in Eight Years

A North Korean women’s football club will travel to South Korea this month, the first visit by a northern sports delegation in nearly eight years during a period of near-total estrangement between the two Koreas.

Naegohyang Women’s FC, based in Pyongyang, will face South Korea’s Suwon FC Women at Suwon Sports Complex on May 20 for the semi-finals of the AFC Women’s Champions League.

South Korea’s football association said the Asian Football Confederation confirmed Naegohyang’s participation on May 1. A delegation of 39 people, including 27 players and 12 staff, is expected to arrive on May 17, according to the unification ministry.

It will be the first time a North Korean women’s football team has competed on southern soil since the 2014 Incheon Asian Games.

It is also the first visit by any North Korean sports delegation since December 2018, when a unified Korean table tennis team competed at a tournament in Incheon.

That visit came at the end of a brief period of inter-Korean sporting rapprochement. The two Koreas marched together under a unification flag at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and fielded a joint women’s ice hockey team. North Korean officials and cheering squads also visited the south.

The latest visit comes amid deep tensions and minimal contact between Seoul and Pyongyang.

South Korea’s president, Lee Jae-myung, who took office in June 2025, has made reviving inter-Korean dialogue a central policy goal. In an address marking Liberation Day last August, he said: “South and North Korea are not enemies.” He renounced any pursuit of unification by absorption and pledged no hostile acts.

An official at the presidential office told the Guardian the government welcomed Naegohyang’s participation in the tournament. The official said the government would work with the AFC and Suwon FC “to ensure that the team can successfully compete in the match.”

Pyongyang has given no public indication of a shift in position. In December 2023, Kim Jong-un redefined inter-Korean relations as those between “two hostile states” in a state of war, a formulation later reflected in state policy and reiterated as recently as March.

Shortly after Lee took office, Kim Yo-jong, a senior North Korean official and the leader’s sister, said in a state media statement that Pyongyang had “no interest” in dialogue regardless of who led the south.

North Korea did not respond to an invitation to the 2025 world archery championships in Gwangju and withdrew from the EAFF women’s football championship hosted in the South last July.

North Korea’s women’s football program ranks 11th in the world, ahead of Australia, China and South Korea. Its youth teams have won the FIFA under-17 women’s World Cup a record four times, including in 2024 and 2025, and the under-20 equivalent three times. Naegohyang beat Suwon 3-0 in the group stage last November in Myanmar.

The final will be held at the same venue on May 23.