President Lee Jae-myung of South Korea issued a statement on Sunday apologizing to the public after the nation’s soccer team failed to qualify for the knockout rounds of the FIFA World Cup.
Lee, of the far-left Democratic Party, described feeling “bewilderment” at the team’s poor performance.
“I am sorry to the people for letting them down with such a preposterous turn of events,” Lee wrote in a message published on social media, stating he felt “not just confusion but utter bewilderment at this unexpected outcome.”
The president took direct aim at the team’s now-former head coach, Hong Myung-bo, who has become so unpopular in the country that various small businesses have placed signs on their doors explicitly banning him from entry.
“When you put an incompetent person in charge by prioritizing any personal connections over their abilities, then it’s easy to predict how things will play out,” Lee wrote. “Such a nonsensical personnel decision that puts personal interests ahead of the common good only happens because it’s impossible, or at least difficult, to keep the person responsible for these decisions in check.”
He concluded with a call for the government to get involved, investigate how such a failure occurred, and take unspecified action to improve the soccer team.
“Since participating in a World Cup requires a lot of taxpayers’ money and other national resources, I would like to ask the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to identify and analyze the cause of the problem and prepare measures to prevent recurrences,” the president asserted.
“We will swiftly push forward with reforms to sports administration to ensure such a thing never happens again,” he promised.
President Lee was far from the only politician to capitalize on the widespread public outrage against the soccer team to stand with the people. Both Democrats and members of the conservative People Power Party (PPP) condemned the Korea Football Association (KFA) for hiring Hong — notably omitting criticism of the players, who many sports experts view as among the best in South Korea’s history — and suggested corruption was behind his hiring.
“The KFA is the biggest enemy for Korean football,” Democratic Party lawmaker Song Young-gil railed. “This outcome has been in the making since the 2014 World Cup (when Hong was also head coach). The hiring process wasn’t fair in the first place. What Korean football needs the most right now isn’t just bringing in a new head coach, but reforming the KFA.”
“The KFA ignored people’s concerns and it is now faced with the outcome that is being criticized,” PPP Rep. Kim Seung-su said in a separate statement. “If I served on the sports committee, I would conduct a thorough review of the KFA’s operations and hold the KFA accountable to ensure sports administration can become trustworthy and Korean football can bounce back.”
An unprecedented 48 teams are contesting this year’s FIFA World Cup, split into 12 groups. South Korean soccer fans considered the group’s team — also featuring Mexico, South Africa, and Czechia — one of the less competitive groups and pointed to the presence of several players on European club soccer teams as evidence that the team should have easily made it to a second round. South Korea, however, lost two of its matches, winning only one and being eliminated before the knockout stage.
Hong, the coach, has been unpopular in the country since he was hired in July 2024 to coach the national team after a disappointing first run in 2014 when the South Korean team also failed to get out of the World Cup’s group stage. He is the only coach in the nation’s history to serve as head coach during two different World Cups and was reported to be competing for the job in 2024 against coaches with better records from other countries. The KFA chose the domestic option, outraging the public given his failures in 2014. The outrage became so great that the National Assembly interrogated Hong and KFA officials. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism launched its own investigation, though these actions resulted in no changes to the KFA’s handling of the team.
Following the poor showing this week, Koreans at home expressed their disappointment and anger in a variety of ways.
“Restaurants and convenience stores began posting notices banning his entry, while online platforms saw threatening posts calling for his murder,” the conservative newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported. “Police are investigating the threatening posts under charges of intimidation and will closely monitor Incheon Airport and other locations to prevent unexpected incidents.”
Among the businesses banning Hong from entry are various restaurants, butcher shops, and convenience stores. The disgust with Hong is so great that the country has canceled any homecoming celebrations to welcome the team back home. One report claimed that Hong and eight of the team players are returning to South Korea on a late-night flight to lower the possibility of mob violence.
Hong resigned and offered a profuse apology on Sunday before returning home.
“I would like to apologize to our fans who love Korean football and support the national team. We didn’t deliver the results that our fans expected, and the responsibility rests entirely with me as head coach,” he asserted.
The scandal arrives at a challenging time for Lee, who ascended to the presidency after his predecessor and formerly victorious rival, Yoon Suk-yeol, was impeached and imprisoned for attempting to impose martial law on the country. Yoon is currently serving a life sentence in prison plus another 30 years for the bizarre 2024 incident in which he claimed that Democratic Party obstruction in the National Assembly required the imposition of military rule. Despite the significant damage to Korean conservatism that Yoon caused, Lee has seen his approval ratings in freefall, dropping for six weeks straight and hitting 46.5 percent in a poll released on Monday. Pollsters attributed the loss in popularity to a scandal involving the June 3 local elections in which voting stations ran out of ballots in dozens of places, disenfranchising voters and prompting weeks of protests.