(Kuala Lumpur) North Korea’s qualifying match against Japan for the 2026 World Cup will be played on neutral ground and not in Pyongyang, the Asian Soccer Confederation announced on Friday, four days before the match.
“In principle, it is the responsibility of the host team to determine the neutral ground, otherwise it will be up to the AFC (Asian Soccer Confederation, Editor’s note) to do so,” declared its general secretary Windsor John to AFP .
Mr John further confirmed that the match would take place as scheduled on Tuesday, without specifying the reasons behind the relocation of the match.
The Japanese news agency Kyodo, for its part, indicated on Thursday that Pyongyang did not wish to host the meeting because of the spread of a bacterial infection in Japan.
North Korea informed Japan on 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 Japan Soccer Federation, Kozo Tasima, on Thursday 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”.
Relations between Tokyo and Pyongyang are tense due to historical disputes dating back to Japan’s colonization of the Korean peninsula (1910-1945) and recent missile tests carried out by North Korea above Japanese territory.
North Korea has generally had a limited presence on the international sporting scene.