Jürgen Klinsmann could be unwitting agent for change in Korean football

Imagine if a day before a major semifinal for England, Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham were involved in a dingdong that ended with the striker nursing dislocated fingers. And this was a story broken by a foreign newspaper few had heard of, then confirmed by the Football Association hours later. That may give some sense of what happened to South Korea with Tottenham’s Son Heung-min and Lee Kang-in of Paris Saint-Germain in February, the longest month in the country’s long football history.

There’s more and it all started with an Asian Cup semi-final defeat against Jordan on 6 February, which ended chances of lifting the continental trophy for the first time since 1960. That game, as seismic as it was partly because of Korea’s abject performance against an opponent ranked 64 places lower, has been overshadowed by what happened next.

Immediately Jürgen Klinsmann said it had been a fantastic tournament, that he wasn’t going to resign as coach and that the focus should be on analysing what had happened. The Korea Football Association (KFA) did just that a week later, conducting an in-depth review, but the 1990 World Cup winner was back in California and attending the review on Zoom. On 15 February, even that remote connection was finally cut.

The main gripe was always the lack of time Klinsmann spent in Korea, with the now infamous stat of 67 days in his first six months in the job. Disappearing almost as soon as the tournament finished added to suspicions that although the smile was there, the heart for the job was not. The KFA called it “disrespectful”.

The organisation has long been controlled by Hyundai, a company that, even in a country known for a punishing work culture, traditionally prided itself on long hours bookended by early-morning breakfasts and latenight drinking. Past foreign coaches had always been based in Seoul; it was a requirement of the job. Demands on Korean managers had been higher