The KFA Shows its Institutional Rot to the World
Written by Michael Welch.
Well, it’s been a DAY. On July 8 in Seoul, the Korea Football Association’s chairman of the national team strengthening committee (essentially the task force that chooses the manager), Lee Lim-saeng, held a press conference to officially announce that Hong Myung-bo will be the national team manager. It’s over.
Five months after sacking Jurgen Klinsmann, the Korean men’s national team finally has a new permanent manager. We went through 2 interim managers (thanks Hwang Sun-hong and Kim Do-hoon), got linked with a bunch of candidate names, and were treated to the most shambolic and clownish hiring process we’ve ever seen.
When public relations professors teach their students how not to conduct themselves as a public-facing organization, this could be a perfect teaching case. Leaking names to the press? Got that. Airing out the dirty laundry of your conversations with candidates to the public? Did that. Ignoring qualified candidates and then dismissing them to the press? Yup. The list goes on and on. After all that, what foreign manager would ever want to work for this football association ever again?
Today, in the US, the English-speaking Korean national team community was treated to a field day as a confused member of Lee Lim-saeng’s committee, Park Joo-ho, went public on YouTube with his thoughts from the inside of that committee. If that name isn’t familiar to you, let me put you on game. Park Joo-ho was a KNT left-back who played for Mainz, Basel, and Dortmund. That’s all you need to know. Well, now we also know that Park Joo-ho is a diligent guy who wanted to go through the process and help the KFA actually hire a good manager. Here’s his video where he talks about what happened as he was part of the committee to hire a replacement for Klinsmann.
For those who aren’t fluent in Korean, myself included, our guy Paul Jeung prepared a Cliff Notes version translating some key points that Park discussed.
Thank you to Park Joo-ho for having the courage to speak out and expose what the KFA was really doing for the five months of this ridiculous manager search.
Finally, I’ll get back to that leading photo. That is Lee Lim-saeng putting on a show for the press on Monday morning in Seoul, as he defends his hiring of Hong Myung-bo, which he alone did. The Korean public isn’t happy about how this hiring process has gone and he got up there with that crying face as if he had saved the whole thing. Well, I hope for his sake he’s right. That’s going to be a hard picture for him to live down if he’s wrong. I mean, it better age like wine because now it’s aging like milk. Bad look.
Right after that press conference, Albert Kim and I recorded an emergency podcast where we broke down all that had went wrong to get us to this point.
Join us as Albert and I went through the emotional rollercoaster of realizing that Hong Myung-bo is back as the Korean national team manager. BibimBallers will be continuing to make videos so like and subscribe for more from us!
To end, all I can say is this has been a ride and there are a lot of emotions going around in the Korean national team fan community. Tell us your thoughts and emotions on this hire in the comments!
The HMB-led World Cup 2014 for Korea was so depressing. Losing to a 10-man Belgium was the lowest of the low.