Deer musk glands, pretend followers, and forbidden buddies — contained in the North Korean ladies’s nationwide soccer staff

When Thomas Gerstner arrived within the foyer of a Munich lodge in 2016, the German soccer coach had a sense that his life was about to take a weird flip.

As he sat in a low armchair, nervously inspecting the faces and outfits of each stranger who walked by way of the revolving door, he thought in regards to the WhatsApp message he’d obtained a number of weeks earlier.

Jørn Andersen, a good friend and colleague, had reached out to Gerstner with a peculiar query.

May he ever think about teaching the North Korean ladies’s nationwide staff?

Gerstner was surprised.

He did not know very a lot about North Korea, however what he did know involved him. It was some of the secluded and secretive nations on earth, led by an notorious dictator who often examined missiles, held monumental public army parades, shut down all types of dissent and opposition, and dominated his folks with an iron fist.

And his good friend wished to ask him backstage.

Gerstner hadn’t coached at a excessive degree for quite a lot of years, and by no means outdoors of Europe. However he was all the time keen on experiences that will problem and alter him, each as a coach and as an individual.

So after mulling it over for a number of weeks, he agreed to satisfy with representatives from North Korea’s Sports activities Ministry to debate the function. That is how he ended up sitting within the foyer of this Munich lodge in September, ready for no matter future was about to open up forward of him.

“It was an excellent dialog,” Gerstner tells ABC Sport.

“And after about two and a half hours, I obtained a suggestion and time to consider it.

“I felt good: the way in which you are feeling with a nice dialog associate, and a suggestion that was arduous to refuse.”

For a soccer coach who hadn’t had a significant gig in 5 years, the supply actually was tough to disregard: a highly-paid nationwide staff place, the power to decide on his employees, a big lodge room completely paid for. He was even promised his personal information and a non-public driver.

Gerstner, throwing warning to the wind, stated sure. He was given six months to organize to depart his residence in Germany for what he described in a Swedish newspaper as “the best journey of my life”.

“At first, the whole lot appeared surreal,” he says.

“I acquired an interpreter, a chauffeur, a big suite with a examine, was accommodated in a lodge with 5 eating places and a wellness space.

“The type of my suite was very old school and took some getting used to, however I rapidly acquired used to the brand new environment and circumstances.

“Initially, I had numerous conversations with attainable assistant trainers, analysts, physiotherapists and docs.

“Sustaining contact with folks from the DPRK is unattainable anyway as a result of they don’t have any entry to the web and can’t talk outdoors. Their cell-phones solely have intranet SIM playing cards; they’ll talk with one another, however not with foreigners at residence or overseas.”

Gerstner arrived in Might 2017, and was tasked with teaching the North Korean under-20s ladies’s nationwide staff.

He joined at an important time: North Korea had simply received the U17 and U20 FIFA Girls’s World Cups the earlier yr, and that new technology of gamers was now getting ready to step up into the senior facet.

He was introduced in to assist them on their method. However first, he was tasked with making an attempt to win the U-20 Girls’s Asian Cup, which might enable them to defend their World Cup title in France the next yr.

And he had simply 5 months to organize. 5 months to study all he might about how North Korean ladies footballers had been developed.

He’d seen their information at worldwide degree — the unbelievable success of their youth groups, juxtaposed with the sluggish slide of the senior staff over the previous decade — however had little concept of how the ladies’s sport truly labored backstage of the nation.

How do they determine gamers? The place do they prepare? Are there home competitions? What’s the help like for gamers on and off the sector?

And who makes all the selections anyway?

Soccer backstage

Soccer in North Korea isn’t the way it seems to be in the remainder of the world.

There are two separate streams for gamers within the nation: the home leagues and the nationwide groups.

Domestically, membership soccer is run by the DPRK Soccer Affiliation, with the very best division consisting of round 13 groups who play towards one another in condensed, round-robin type tournaments held each two months throughout the yr.

All golf equipment within the DPRK characterize totally different state enterprises or organisations, equivalent to tram factories or authorities departments or the army, which have each males’s and girls’s groups.

The most well-liked and profitable membership is 4.25 Soccer Membership: a reference to April twenty fifth, the day that North Korea’s military was based in 1978. The oldest membership within the nation is Amrokkang Sports activities Membership, the worldwide safety staff that was based in 1947, making it older than North Korea itself.

However details about these home leagues and who performs in them is scarce. Outcomes will not be printed, there are not any commercials for his or her video games (there are not any commercials for something in North Korea), matches will not be televised, and there are not any public information of staff lists or officers or crowd numbers.

It is unknown whether or not gamers are full-time athletes, or if soccer is just an exercise they take part in on the facet of their different work.

A few of the golf equipment’ finest gamers are supposedly given particular therapy, equivalent to nicer residences and further meals rations, however what their on a regular basis lives are like stays a thriller.

In response to Gerstner, the nationwide groups function in another way.

“All gamers from the varied nationwide groups are within the Nationwide Coaching Centre (NTC) 24/7 and don’t play for golf equipment after they have been chosen,” Gerstner says.

“They’re accommodated within the NTC, obtain full meals, and are merely proud to characterize their nation. They’re taught there every single day and revel in being privileged.

“There isn’t any group help for soccer. Throughout worldwide matches, folks from the army and universities are ordered to go to their nationwide staff’s video games.

“Because of this one of many largest stadiums on the planet [the May Day Stadium, with a capacity of 150,000 people] is stuffed with round 50% uniformed troopers and 50% college students.

“Within the DPRK, nobody decides whether or not she or he will play soccer; that’s determined elsewhere. Each one that has a particular expertise for one thing receives most help on this space, whether or not it is piano classes or horse using or soccer coaching.”

Determined by whom? Gerstner would not say.

However his remark factors to the extra shadowy points of North Korean soccer, which is the place a lot of the exterior intrigue lies.

By nearly any metric, the DPRK is seen as one in every of the most oppressive political regimes in the world. It often ranks on the backside of lists concerning press freedom, whereas particular person liberties are closely restricted.

Public opposition to the regime can result in punishments equivalent to torture, pressured labour, and imprisonment. Allegiance to the one-party management is paramount. In response to the United Nations, North Korea is a state “that doesn’t have any parallel within the modern world”.

As such, only a few foreigners have been granted entry contained in the DPRK to watch the way in which soccer operates domestically. And even after they have, their experiences have been utterly managed by what the state needs them to see.

In 2008, Austrian film-maker Brigitte Weich was allowed into the nation to supply a documentary referred to as “Hana, Dul, Sed”: a movie that adopted 4 ladies’s nationwide staff gamers by way of their soccer careers and into what was implied as pressured retirement after they didn’t qualify for the 2004 Olympics.

“I might by no means seen something like Pyongyang earlier than,” Weich wrote on the film’s website.

“It’s unattainable to maneuver about freely within the metropolis: the second you arrive on the airport, you’re met by a information who, besides if you find yourself at your lodge, by no means leaves your facet till you’re again on the airplane heading residence.

“Like each North Korean, your information wears a lapel badge bearing the picture of both Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il, and each second sentence he or she utters is in reward of the ‘Nice Chief,’ who’s accountable for all of the fantastic issues you’re being proven throughout your go to.

“I’m typically requested whether or not it wasn’t terribly restrictive to shoot a movie in a totalitarian Large Brother regime.

“However to me, the restrictions had been already a part of the story: we did not wish to present how we noticed North Korea, we wished to see what these ladies would present us.”

Because the nation’s founding in 1948, the DPRK has gone to excessive lengths to manage its projected picture to the remainder of the world.

‘Sweet-coloured mirage’

Anecdotes from international vacationers, athletes, and journalists recount how micro-managed their experiences are, with their total journey feeling like a stage-play, like one thing not fairly actual.

In Pyongyang, the capital, the streets and buildings and parks are impossibly clear. Huge posters depicting the Kim household are hung from bridges and lamp-posts, visitors is quiet and sparse, and public crowds are minimal.

The filth and scars of a lived-in nation are swept beneath the facade of this impeccable place, with poor and rural populations saved out of sight. Contact between the within and the skin world is closely managed.

Jerome Champagne, a former FIFA official, recalled that there was only one method to talk with your entire DPRK affiliation throughout his time with the governing physique.

“There was one fax quantity,” he says in an interview.

“You despatched a fax. Generally you bought a reply.”

Lately, there may be supposedly a single electronic mail tackle.

You are by no means assured a response.

North Korea reveals you solely what it needs you to see.

Greater than a sport

Soccer has been one in every of North Korea’s most seen — and most susceptible — doorways to the skin world.

The nation’s founding chief, Kim Il Sung, often emphasised the significance of sport and bodily health as a projection of the nation’s self-image on the worldwide stage.

“We must always popularise bodily tradition and sport, make them a part of our on a regular basis life, and thus enhance the bodily health of your entire nation,” he as soon as informed the Sixth Congress of the ruling Employees’ Celebration of Korea in 1980.

“We also needs to quickly develop our sporting science and talent.”

Soccer’s function as a pillar of North Korean energy and character was captured in an internally-produced 1978 movie titled “Centre Ahead,” which tells the story of a younger male footballer who embarks on a Rocky-esque journey to work arduous and enhance his health and talent with a purpose to characterize the senior staff.

“Communist nations wish to acquire a excessive degree of appreciation outdoors of their nations by way of sport, and particularly soccer,” Gerstner says.

This love of the sport seems to run within the household, with the nation’s present chief, Kim Jong Un, often attending soccer matches at residence. He’s supposedly a big Manchester United fan, and has prior to now ordered the state broadcaster to point out the membership’s matches on public tv: a rarity within the tightly-controlled media panorama of North Korea.

The primary critical glimpse that the world acquired of North Korean soccer was again in 1966, when the lads’s nationwide staff — nicknamed “Cheollima”, the title of a legendary horse that may cowl 400km in a single day and can’t be mounted by a mortal human — certified for the FIFA World Cup finals in England.

Their outstanding run, which was later documented in a film titled “The Game of Their Lives,” included a well-known 1-0 win over Italy in one of many biggest upsets in World Cup historical past.

That win, which adopted a draw towards Chile, noticed them grow to be the primary Asian staff to achieve the quarter-finals of the event.

They misplaced the subsequent sport to Portugal 5-3, however the few surviving gamers from that facet have been hailed as heroes in North Korea (and, oddly sufficient, in Middlesbrough, the place they had been primarily based throughout the World Cup) ever since.

As a part of this larger imaginative and prescient of utilizing sport as a geopolitical instrument, and maintaining with Kim Il Sung’s plan to quickly enhance their sporting prospects, North Korea has closely invested in services and infrastructure to offer its athletes the absolute best probability to dominate on the world stage.

This funding has been notably efficient within the ladies’s sport, with North Korean groups dominating the youth ranges and Asian competitions over the previous 20 years.

The Taesong District Juvenile Sports activities College within the capital Pyongyang is likely one of the most well-known coaching bases. It has had its personal ladies’s soccer program since 1999, working intently with the Academy of Sports activities Science to observe gamers over a number of age teams and design coaching packages to maximise their bodily skills.

The college holds ‘exams’ of a form, testing 1000’s of fledgling footballers to evaluate their suitability for worldwide competitors. Soccer is a part of the curriculum, with idea and bodily coaching constructed into a baby’s on a regular basis examine. Faculties often compete towards one another in tournaments throughout the provinces.

A few of the gamers who received the DPRK’s first ever World Cup — the U-20 Girls’s World Cup in 2006 — had been apparently developed on the Taesong coaching base, and had been awarded the titles of “Labour Hero” and “Peoples’ Sportsperson” upon their return.

Certainly, North Korea seems to have been forward of the curve in constructing gender equality into its soccer improvement buildings. 

In a 2019 visit to the DPRK, journalist James Montague noticed that feminine gamers got the identical services, alternatives, teaching, and gear as male gamers, and had been already way more superior at junior degree.

Since 2012, the genders have supposedly been blended collectively “to assist the boys enhance”, in response to one of many interviewed coaches.

So in style is ladies’s soccer in North Korea that KCT even as soon as developed its personal mini-series in 2011 titled “Our Women’s Soccer Team”, which confirmed a fictionalised group of nationwide staff gamers navigating modern-day North Korea and galvanizing younger folks with their soccer expertise.

Because of this, North Korea has been a stunning pressure on the continental stage for the reason that Nineties.

They broke China’s stranglehold on the Girls’s Asian Cup after they received their first title in 2001, after which received it twice extra in 2003 and 2008. They’ve received the Asian Video games thrice, too, in addition to ending runners-up thrice extra, together with in the newest version final yr.

On the worldwide stage, they’ve participated within the Girls’s World Cup 4 occasions — twice as many as their males’s staff — together with progressing to the knock-outs again in 2007. They’ve additionally been to 2 Olympic Video games, in 2008 and 2012, however have didn’t make it previous the group stage.

Regardless of that, North Korea has been a mainstay within the FIFA high ten rankings for over a decade. They had been solely de-listed final yr after a protracted interval of inactivity led to by the COVID-19 pandemic. They returned to the rankings in late 2023 and presently sit ninth, three locations above the Matildas.

It is a curious rating given North Korea has not participated in a significant worldwide event since their final Olympics in 2012. When contacted for remark, FIFA stated the ‘inactivity’ interval had been prolonged from 18 to 48 months throughout the pandemic, in keeping with the lads’s facet. However they didn’t elaborate on why the DPRK had maintained its high 10 rating regardless of no main competitions prior to now ten years.

Rating mysteries apart, rumours have been swirling for many years that North Korean gamers are supplied with extra than simply teaching, diet, services and gear which have made them so aggressive.

In the course of the 2011 Girls’s World Cup in Germany, 5 senior North Korean gamers failed doping exams. The federation was fined $400,000 and banned from qualifying for the 2015 World Cup in Canada.

The official clarification given by the DPRK was that their gamers had been struck by lightning and handled with a conventional drugs constituted of deer musk glands, which contributed to false-positive drug take a look at outcomes.

The truth is, so uncommon was this substance that it had by no means earlier than been detected by anti-doping know-how anyplace in world sport, so it was not a part of any laws. FIFA banned the nation anyway, however the Worldwide Olympic Committee didn’t, permitting the DPRK to take part within the 2012 London Olympics.

And the staff who missed out on qualifying for the Video games that yr as a result of North Korea’s involvement? Australia.

Certainly, the Matildas have a protracted, tense historical past towards the DPRK. They’ve met a number of occasions in worldwide competitors, most notably within the closing of the 2010 Girls’s Asian Cup, the place Australia received on penalties.

On the uncommon events that North Korea have travelled to Australia to play, controversy has adopted. In 2006, on the Girls’s Asian Cup hosted in Adelaide, DPRK officers requested that their web page within the event’s official information be ripped out of each single copy and destroyed.

Every week later, within the closing minutes of a semi-final between North Korea and China, an equalising purpose for the DPRK was referred to as offside by the referee. When the full-time whistle signalled a 1-0 win to China, the livid North Korean goalkeeper shoved the referee and earned a straight crimson card. Her team-mates then chased the referee and her assistants, throwing bottles of water at them as they ran, earlier than police needed to intervene and escort the officers off the sector for their very own security.

It isn’t identified what occurred to these gamers, nor those who had been discovered to have doped on the 2011 World Cup as soon as they returned to the DPRK, however it’s extensively believed that punishment for athletes who fail or embarrass the state on the worldwide stage might be extreme.

For instance, after the lads’s nationwide staff had been bundled out of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa — shedding 7-0 to Portugal in a uncommon stay sports activities broadcast that was proven throughout the nation — North Korean leaders reportedly carried out six hours of public humiliations of the gamers in entrance of over 400 authorities officers, whereas their head coach was banished to a constructing website.

An investigation by FIFA cleared DPRK of the allegations later that yr. However the shadow of the curtain nonetheless lingers.

Soccer past the curtain

This was the unusual, secretive world that Gerstner grew to become aware of throughout his time with the U20 ladies’s nationwide staff as they ready for the 2017 Asian Cup in China.

Simply as soccer provides the world a glimpse inside North Korea, the sport additionally provides North Koreans a glimpse of the world.

However such glimpses might be dangerous, and the nation’s leaders put as many protocols in place as they’ll to make sure that a glimpse would not flip into one thing extra.

“The gamers had been very shy at first,” he says.

“And so they had been authorised by the affiliation, so that they knew precisely how they needed to behave in the direction of me in response to the directions.

“Daily, they grew to become looser and funnier, whispered and laughed and visibly blossomed.

“Nonetheless, direct communication was by no means attainable as a result of the whole lot went by way of Mrs Hwang, my interpreter.

“The gamers on my staff had been happier than many younger folks in Western nations are. They do not miss something, and are grateful for the whole lot and have nice respect.”

North Korean nationwide groups rarely journey past their borders, so after they do, there are strict guidelines in place.

Coaches and gamers are hardly ever, if ever, interviewed by international media, and do not seem in public media conferences until required to by competitors organisers.

In shared inns, North Korean gamers and employees stick collectively, ignoring these from different nations, understanding that they are doubtless being monitored by their very own authorities’s officers always. They often reserve total flooring or wings for themselves to make sure they do not work together with anybody else.

Gerstner was knowledgeable of all these guidelines earlier than he set off along with his staff to China in October of 2017.

“In fact, I used to be involved that a number of of the gamers would possibly disappear throughout our journey and never return to DPRK,” he says.

“However I used to be reassured that this may not occur and that I used to be not accountable for it.

“We travelled to Nanjing with nearly 30 gamers and as many employees members and officers to play within the Asian Cup and qualify for the 2018 U20 World Cup in France. To do that, we needed to end no less than third.

“The gamers had been very excited, but additionally proud that they’d expertise one thing that just a few folks in DPRK get to expertise.

“The gamers every obtained $10 and had been allowed to purchase one thing to recollect [the trip] by, and naturally everybody knew that this was my concept.

“Everybody carried out very well. Sadly, we misplaced the ultimate to Japan 0-1, however we certified for the World Cup by reaching the ultimate. However in nations like DPRK, the second-place is the primary loser-place. All of them anticipated to be champions.”

That expectation is now beginning to create issues inside North Korean soccer. Whereas their insularity has given them some benefits on the sporting stage prior to now — having the ability to prepare and play in secret, and giving their gamers as many assets as attainable to develop from a younger age — that very same isolation is now holding them again.

As world soccer evolves, particularly on the ladies’s facet, the DPRK is falling additional behind technically and tactically, with new concepts and programs and techniques not making their method contained in the nation till months, and even years, later.

Gamers, too, have been deprived by this insularity. Till not too long ago, only a few North Koreans — particularly those that had been born within the nation — had been ever allowed to play membership soccer overseas.

However the affiliation is now recognising that the sport is accelerating away from them, so has begun to slowly creak open their door, with a handful of males’s nationwide staff gamers now permitted to play membership soccer elsewhere.

The nationwide groups’ experimentation with international coaches equivalent to Gerstner, in addition to his WhatsApp good friend Anderson, who coached the lads’s senior staff on the time, has been one other try and introduce world concepts to their native soccer packages, particularly at senior degree the place physicality is now not the only determinant of success.

However as they slowly open themselves as much as the soccer world, North Korea dangers loosening its white-knuckle grip by itself picture and its personal folks, particularly those that grow to be extra uncovered to life past the curtain.

The nation is due to this fact caught between these two locations: desirous to proceed difficult on the worldwide sporting stage, however not desirous to step too far outdoors of itself and probably shatter the picture it has spent many years constructing.

What’s going to this imply for the way forward for the North Korean sport?

Gerstner would not know. And he hasn’t hung round to search out out. The German resigned from his function in 2018 to take up a task again residence, although he nonetheless retains a watch on the ladies’s nationwide groups from afar.

He watched with satisfaction because the gamers he coached defeated Mexico and Brazil to achieve the quarter-final of the 2018 Girls’s World Cup.

A few of them have since made the leap to the senior staff, which went on to win the Cyprus Girls’s Cup in 2019, poetically defeating Italy within the closing.

However then the pandemic shut them down. Three lengthy, silent years handed, with North Korea withdrawing from all competitions and cancelling all video games. No one spoke to or heard from anybody contained in the federation throughout this time. The one electronic mail tackle by no means responded.

It isn’t identified what occurred to the gamers within the meantime: how they educated, performed, or ready for his or her return again to worldwide sport. All we all know is that they did one thing, as a result of they got here again with a bang, ending with a silver medal no less than yr’s Asian Video games regardless of lasting nearly a complete World Cup cycle with no world competitors.

And this week could possibly be the most important alternative but for North Korea to check the boundaries of their interiority as their ladies’s staff faces Japan in a two-legged qualifying play-off for the Paris Olympics.

In the event that they win, they’re going to make their first Video games since that controversial 2012 event in London: the yr that noticed their ladies’s nationwide staff start its sluggish slide earlier than falling completely out of sight.

But when they lose, they’re going to return to North Korea and face no matter penalties await. And the curtain will probably be drawn again throughout them as soon as once more.