North Korean women's football club arrives in South Korea for rare sporting collaboration

A North Korea-based women's football club arrived in neighbouring South Korea on Sunday in a rare sporting breakthrough for the two nations. Pyongyang-based Naegohyang Women’s FC is scheduled to face South Korea’s Suwon FC Women in the semi-finals of the AFC Women’s Champions League on May 20 in Suwon, about 30 km south of Seoul.

The North Korean delegation of 39 members, including 27 players and 12 support staff, arrived in South Korea on Sunday. The group landed in Incheon from Beijing and will be staying until May 24 in South Korea.

A group in favour of unification of the Korean peninsula, chanted "welcome" slogans for the North Korean team at the airport but the visiting team members ignored them, as per CNN.

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Historic visit

This is the first time after a gap of almost eight years that any North Korean sports team has visited its southern neighbour.

The last notable inter-Korean football encounter was during the 2018 Asian Games. The match has generated significant excitement, with all 7,087 general admission tickets selling out within 12 hours of release.

The visit of the Pyongyang-based club comes at a time when the relations between the two neighbours have threatened to turn from bad to worse. The relations between the two neighbours have sharply deteriorated since US-North Korea nuclear talks collapsed in 2019. The two Koreas remain technically at war because the 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty.

However, despite the conflict, the two countries have found some moments of sporting cooperation here and there. North Korea had sent athletes, cheerleaders and a high-level delegation to the 2018 Winter Olympics in the South. The two Koreas also fielded their first unified Olympic team—a joint women’s ice hockey squad—at the Pyeongchang Games.

Seoul’s unification ministry will reportedly provide 300 million won ($200,000) to support South Korean civic groups planning to cheer both teams at the match.