Who to blame for Korea's World Cup failure

Hong Myung-bo holds a press conference at Chivas Valle Verde in Zapopan, near Guadalajara, Mexico, to announce his resignation, June 28 (local time). Yonhap

By Scott Shepherd

• Published Jul 4, 2026 8:00 AM KST

After Korea’s early exit from the football World Cup, I find myself among the ranks of those disappointed by the team’s performance, though certainly not the most disappointed. I had hopes that Korea would do fairly well this time, hopes that have been emphatically dashed.

Certainly, Korea did much worse than it should have, especially given that the expanded number of teams meant more routes for getting through to the next round. And while a loss to Mexico on its home turf is fair enough, much less forgivable is the failure at least to hold South Africa to a draw.

I have no intention to anatomize the mistakes and failures which led to this disappointment. Plenty have enthusiastically taken up that task. Most of the blame has landed at the feet of former head coach Hong Myung-bo, who for the second time in his career has failed to guide the team out of the group stage.

The charges leveled against him seem fair: He showed inferior leadership, insufficient creativity and made poor tactical decisions. But it is more than that: The very process by which he was appointed has become the subject of controversy. Murmurs of corruption abound. Even President Lee Jae Myung posted a long complaint on social media about "favoritism and cronyism" in personnel appointments.

In fact, the outgoing head of the Korea Football Association (KFA), Chung Mong-gyu, is now under investigation by the police for alleged abuse of power in his appointment of Hong. It is little surprise that this was announced on Monday, the day after Korea’s elimination was confirmed, and, just as relevantly, the day after Lee’s social media post.

The loss by the national team has turned out to be an easy win for politicians: Hong and Chung are the targets of public ire, so politicians on all sides are piling in. Hong is now more than just a manager who failed to get through the group stages; he has become the scapegoat for the whole country.

The players themselves — and in particular the nation’s beloved Son Heung-min — come out of the defeat with their popularity relatively intact. But if media, political and social headwinds had blown a different way, Son and his fellows could just as easily have been the focus of national rage. They were, after all, the ones tasked with actually kicking the ball.

To be fair, the obloquy faced by Hong and Chung is not simply incited by cynical politicians or nervous players. At the time of Hong’s reappointment in 2024, there was a real and sustained campaign to investigate the KFA for its failure to follow the process, as the Korea Times has reported.

It doesn’t help that outgoing KFA head Chung is a member of the chaebol family that runs the Hyundai Group. If the reports are correct, the appointment does seem to have been dodgy, to say the least. The regular procedure was apparently ignored, with Chung at the KFA hiring Hong rather than several foreign coaches who had been recommended under the proper process.

Yet the response to the team’s failure seems a little inconsistent. Let’s imagine a scenario where Korea had scraped through the first round, not because the team itself had done anything different, but because the other group matches had gone differently. Then let’s pretend Korea, buoyed by its luck at scraping through, went on to beat its opponent 1-0, and in the final 16 went on to win a hair-raising victory in the 92nd minute, before losing honorably in the semi-finals to a powerhouse like Brazil or Germany.

This is all imaginary, but it was an entirely plausible scenario a week ago. If it had come to pass, what a different narrative we would be reading. Chung’s appointment of Hong would not have been an "unfair and opaque process," but a brilliant example of executive leadership in the face of bureaucratic red tape. Hong’s failure in 2014 would have been a settling-in period; he would have been lauded for quickly turning the team around this time in just two short years since resuming his job. Talk about investigating or reforming the KFA would be muted. Instead of demanding inquiries, the Korean president would probably be handing Hong and Chung medals.

Of course, none of that happened. Hong has resigned in disgrace, returning home to jeering crowds at the airport. We could spend all day dreaming about different scenarios where things had gone our way — this is, in fact, the quadrennial hobby of disappointed fans all over the world. But fantasizing doesn’t change what happened, and Hong’s resignation is appropriate because the results do matter.

What matters even more is the process. While there was harsh criticism two years ago of the process that led to Hong’s appointment, even the 2024 intervention by the Ministry of Sports didn’t succeed at restructuring the KFA (though it did lead to Chung’s announcement that he would retire early). The current cross-party consensus that something needs to be done is right — not because the Korean team was knocked out so early, but because of the alleged wrongdoing in the hiring process.

If the accusations are true, this hullaballoo should have happened whether or not Korea had been knocked out of the competition so early, and even if the Korean team had actually won the whole competition. The police investigation into Chung should not have been announced only after Korea had been eliminated and the president had complained online.

As it is, this is progress at least, even if it only comes about because of the team’s dismal performance. We can at least hope that something good will come out of it all. It will take time for things to get sorted out, but hopefully in four years Korea’s supporters can cheer on the team with much more trust in the system. And, by then, if they sort out all the off-pitch mess, maybe the team will be able to do a little better.