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North Korean state television began airing matches from two major European football leagues last month, but notably absent are games involving South Korean players, a study by a Washington-based think tank revealed.
Broadcasts of the English Premier League and the UEFA Champions League -- the yearly tournament for Europe’s best teams -- is delayed by several months, but is still quite popular with North Korean viewers, said the report by the Stimson Center’s 38 North project.
State TV is rife with propaganda, but sports is “one of the few moments each day when state TV is not trying to send an overt or underlying message to its viewers,” 38 North said.
“There wasn’t really any intention to the research except that we thought it was interesting,” Martyn Williams, who co-authored the report, told RFA Korean. “We just saw a lot of football on KCTV. It’s the main international sport they broadcast.”
Football and circuses to distract the masses
Sports became more important during the pandemic, during which Korean Central Television, or KCTV, had to double its output as people were spending more time at home, the report said.
That meant that an extra hour was slotted for sports, especially soccer, and the trend has continued.
The football matches are shown an average of four months after they were played -- the English Premier League, or EPL, season began in August, and the Champions League began in September.
The apparent ban on airing matches with South Korean players means that North Korean fans won’t see matches featuring South Korean national team captain Son Heung-min, who also captains the Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur.
The report revealed that coverage of last year’s EPL left out Hwang Hee-chan and the Wolverhampton Wanderers, and Kim Ji-soo, who plays for Brentford.
In the Champions League, it remains to be seen if the French side Paris Saint-Germain and Lee Kang-in will be broadcast because of the delay, but KCTV coverage of last year’s Champions League featured the team only in its losing effort against Germany’s Borussia Dortmund in the semifinal.
Premier League preference
The report said that in 2022, matches from the EPL, Germany’s Bundesliga, Spain’s La Liga, France’s Ligue 1, and Italy’s Serie A were aired, but the following year, KCTV settled on the Premier League, the FIFA World Cup, and the UEFA Champions League.
Matches are shortened from 90 minutes to 60 minutes and are aired right before the 5 p.m. news bulletin, it said.
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The report noted that only 21 of the Premier League’s 380 matches last season were aired, and six teams were not shown at all.
“It is perhaps not a coincidence that three of those teams—Brentford, Spurs and Wolves—were not broadcast, as they have South Korean players in their teams," it said.
World Cup whiteout
38 North said political messages still do make their way into football coverage, however.
For example, in KCTV’s matches of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, South Korea was not shown until it was eliminated in a 4-1 drubbing to Brazil.
In a quarterfinal match between North and South Korea’s women’s sides at the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, which were postponed to 2023 because of COVID, KCTV graphics labeled the South Korean team as “puppets,” a derogatory term that implies that South Korea is a puppet state controlled by the United States.
In North Korea, there exist certain taboos about openly supporting athletes from the South, according to Lee Hyunseung of the U.S.-based Global Peace Foundation, who escaped from North Korea in 2014.
Lee said that when he was young he watched Italian and Spanish soccer matches on KCTV.
“At the time, I had no idea about Korean players like Park Ji-sung , Ahn Jung-hwan , and Seol Ki-hyeon who were playing in European leagues,” he told RFA Korean, referring to players who became household names in the South as part of the national team that unexpectedly advanced to the semifinals in the 2002 FIFA World Cup.
“It was only after I went to study abroad in China that I was able to watch their matches,” he said.
He said that North Koreans tend to cheer for South Korean players on European teams despite the taboos.
“That is why the North Korean regime is very concerned about this,” said Lee. “They must never show that South Korea is better than North Korea . They are afraid of that because it weakens the North Korean regime.”
Translated by Eugene Whong. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.