North Korean women's football team arrives in South Korea for AFC Champions League semifinals

By Yoo Jee-ho

SEOUL, May 17 (Yonhap) -- The North Korean women's football club Naegohyang Women's FC arrived in South Korea on Sunday for a much-anticipated inter-Korean match this week.

Naegohyang will take on Suwon FC Women in the semifinals of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Women's Champions League at Suwon Stadium in Suwon, some 30 kilometers south of Seoul, at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

Now in its second year, the Women's Champions League is Asia's top women's club competition and offers US$1 million to the champions.

Naegohyang's 27 players and 12 members of their staff traveled from Beijing, where they had been training since Tuesday, and landed at Incheon International Airport, just west of Seoul, just after 2 p.m. Sunday.

Naegohyang Women's FC are the first North Korean women's football club to cross the border. They are also the first group of North Korean athletes to travel to South Korea for competition since December 2018, when North Korea sent players to International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) World Tour Grand Finals in Incheon.

Naegohyang will have an official training session and a press conference Tuesday, the eve of the match.

This will be the second meeting of the tournament between Naegohyang and Suwon FC Women. In their Group C showdown on Nov. 12 last year, with Myanmar's Yangon serving as the centralized venue for the entire group, Naegohyang prevailed 3-0 behind a brace by Ri Su-jong and a goal by Pak Ye-gyong.

Of the some 9,000 tickets, 7,087 tickets available for the general public were all snatched up just hours after going on sale Tuesday, according to the Korea Football Association.

The unification ministry has offered to dip into the Inter-Korean Cooperation Fund to purchase the remaining tickets for members of civic groups who will form cheerleading squads and also to help them produce banners and buy other props for the match. Those groups have said they will root for both clubs and refrain from stating the names of the countries, since the match is between clubs, not nations.

The match has drawn massive media interest as well. The AFC, while acknowledging the unique nature of inter-Korean relations, has said it wants to keep the focus of the week on football and make the tournament a purely sporting event shielded from external political agendas.

The other semifinal match will pit Melbourne City FC against Nippon TV Tokyo Verdy Beleza at 2 p.m. Wednesday, also at Suwon Stadium.

The final is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday at Suwon Stadium.