North Korea instructed Japan on Thursday that it can’t host subsequent week’s World Cup qualifier, Japan’s soccer affiliation chief Kozo Tashima stated, throwing the sport into doubt.
North Korea was scheduled to play Japan in Pyongyang on Tuesday within the second recreation of a doubleheader on the highway to the 2026 World Cup.
But North Korean officers “told us that the game cannot go ahead in Pyongyang”, Kozo Tashima stated after the 2 sides met in a primary qualifier in Tokyo, which Japan received 1-0.
“They asked us during half-time if we can organise (it) in Japan,” native media quoted Tashima as saying.
“I told them it was so sudden and that I cannot give them an immediate yes. I told them it will take us at least two or three days (to answer). I told them it’s difficult,” he stated.
The match in Pyongyang would have been the primary recreation in North Korea for Japan’s males’s workforce since 2011.
Tashima gave no cause for North Korea’s obvious change of coronary heart. But Japanese news company Kyodo reported that North Korea didn’t need to host the match over fears of bacterial infections in Japan.
ALSO READ | FIFA World Cup 2026 qualifiers: Japan rides on Ao Tanaka’s early strike to beat North Korea
Earlier this week Japan’s international ministry warned soccer followers to not try and journey to North Korea for the match.
“As you know, North Korea takes a hostile view of Japan and travel is not recommended for the general public,” it stated on X, previously Twitter.
Fourteen authorities officers have been set to accompany the Japan workforce for the match in addition to a small variety of media shops, broadcaster NHK reported.
The first leg of its girls’s playoff for the Paris 2024 Olympics was switched from Pyongyang to impartial floor in Saudi Arabia final month.
Relations have lengthy been dogged by points together with compensation for Japan’s brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula between 1910 and 1945 and extra not too long ago by Pyongyang’s firing of missiles over Japanese territory.
Despite being remoted and poor, North Korea certified for the 2010 World Cup. But they have been knocked out on the group stage following three defeats, together with a 7-0 thumping by Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal.
They additionally certified in 1966 after they famously beat Italy 1-0 and made it to the quarter-finals.
