North Korea Edges South Korea in Rare Women's Soccer Clash

North Korea's women's soccer team flew into the South this week with poker faces—and flew out with a win. In their first game on South Korean soil in eight years, Pyongyang's Naegohyang club beat South Korea's Suwon FC 2-1 on Wednesday, taking the Asian Football Confederation semifinal. The Washington Post reports they arrived "stone-faced" and silent, but were smiling by the time their victory arrived. The match, held in Suwon before thousands of rain-soaked fans, was the first-ever women's club clash between the two Koreas and the first visit by North Korean athletes since 2018.

If anyone hoped for a reprise of the warm scenes from the PyeongChang Olympics that year, during which athletes from both countries marched under the same flag, they didn't get it. North Korean players ignored cheering crowds at the airport, requested to stay in a separate hotel from their opponents, and brushed off questions about inter-Korean ties. "We came here strictly to play the game," coach Ri Yu Il said. Civic groups had organized a joint cheering section featuring displaced families and North Korean escapees waving flags for both teams, but the visitors barely reacted—until the final whistle, when the scoreboard, not the symbolism, gave them something to celebrate.

The New York Times reports civic groups in the South made sure there would be volunteers cheering for both sides so the players from the North felt welcomed, and a traditional dance troupe performing outside the stadium announced both teams' names. "We can't go to the North and we can't meet its people, so this is as close as I can get to see people from my hometown," says one South Korean general whose family lived in Pyongyang but fled Communist rule during the Korean War. The AP notes warm relations between athletes from the North and South have dissipated as the political relationship between the rival Koreas has deteriorated further in recent years.