SEOUL, March 4 — A North Korean women’s football club will become the first sports team from the country to play in South Korea since 2018 when they visit this month, Seoul’s unification ministry said today.

The neighbours remain technically at war after their 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty, and sporting and cultural exchanges between them are very rare.

Naegohyang Women’s FC will play the South’s Suwon FC Women on May 20 in the semi-finals of the Asian Champions League.

The visiting delegation will include 27 players and 12 club staff, the ministry said. South Korea’s football association told AFP that the team would arrive on May 17.

They will fly into Incheon airport on an Air China flight from Beijing, a unification ministry official told reporters.

The winner of the match at Suwon Sports Complex, south of the capital Seoul, will play the final of Asia’s top women’s club competition against either Australia’s Melbourne City or Japan’s Tokyo Verdy Beleza on May 23.

“The losing team in the semi-final will return home on Thursday, May 21, with no third-place playoff scheduled,” the ministry said in a press release.

The match will be the first time a North Korean sports team has played in the South since shooting, youth football and table tennis delegations travelled there in 2018.

The last time Pyongyang sent a women’s football team to the South was in 2014, when the North Korean national team took part at the Asian Games in Incheon.

Founded in 2012 and based in the North Korean capital, much of Naegohyang’s squad is “made up of national team-level players”, the ministry said.

North Korea’s national team is one of the dominant forces in Asian women’s football, winning multiple international titles in recent years, especially at youth level.

The most recent one came in November last year, when they defeated the Netherlands 3-0 in the final of the U-17 Women’s World Cup.

Peace overtures 

The announcement comes as Seoul seeks a rapprochement with Pyongyang after years of bad blood.

South Korea’s dovish President Lee Jae Myung has called for talks with the North without any preconditions, saying the countries are destined “to make the flowers of peace bloom”.

The North has not responded to the Lee administration’s overtures and has repeatedly labelled the South its “most hostile” adversary.

For Seoul, the match is an opportunity to establish “at least a basic communication channel between North and South Korea”, Lim Eul-chul, a North Korea expert at the South’s Kyungnam University, said.

“It could become a chance to test peaceful coexistence,” he told AFP.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has vowed to boost his nuclear forces, and Pyongyang conducted four missile tests in April, the most in a single month for over two years.

Pyongyang has also drawn closer to Russia, sending troops and artillery shells to support its invasion of Ukraine.

Observers say Pyongyang is receiving military technology assistance from Moscow in return. — AFP