North Korea-Japan will ultimately not take place next Tuesday as planned. “The match between the Democratic Republic of Korea and Japan on March 26 will not take place due to unforeseen circumstances,” the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) said in a statement on Friday.
The AFC first indicated on Friday that the qualifying match for the 2026 World Cup would be played on neutral ground and not in Pyongyang in the North Korean capital.
“In principle, it is the responsibility of the host team to determine the neutral ground, otherwise it will be up to the AFC (Editor’s note: Asian Football Confederation) to do so,” declared its general secretary Windsor John to AFP .
A request for relocation “during half-time”
The Japanese news agency Kyodo, for its part, indicated Thursday that Pyongyang did not wish to host the meeting because of the spread of a bacterial infection in Japan. North Korea informed Japan this Thursday that it would not be able to host the match, without specifying the reasons.
“They asked us during half-time if we could organize (the meeting) in Japan,” said the president of the Japanese Football Federation, Kozo Tasima, after the first qualifying match between the two countries played in Tokyo. “I told them that this request was so sudden that I could not immediately answer them in the affirmative,” he continued, after this match won 1-0 by Japan. I explained to them that it would take us at least two or three days to respond to them, I pointed out to them that it was complicated. »
In February, the first leg of the women’s qualifiers for the Paris Olympic Games between the two countries scheduled for Pyongyang was relocated to Saudi Arabia, considered neutral ground. Tuesday’s match would have been the first played in North Korea by the Japanese since 2011.
The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had already advised its nationals against traveling to North Korea for the meeting, arguing that this country had a “hostile view of Japan”.
