Football: When Brazil played in North Korea … sort of

Jul 09, 2020 11:01 7 min read

From atop the Arch of Triumph, a monument of much pride for North Korea, one of the officials who guided me around my ten-day stay in the most closed-off country in the world directed my attention to the grand stadium directly in front, for two reasons:

“In this stadium, our Eternal President made his first speech after liberating the Korean people from Japanese imperialists. Oh, and it was also there that Brazil played against our national football team. You must have heard about that match. It was very good. I was there.”

It was September 2017. I had entered North Korea (officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) with government permission for a visit that would result in a series of articles and my third book, The Hermit Kingdom. Among the conditions to receive a visa for North Korea was agreeing to the permanent surveillance of three guides and relinquishing any control over my choice of hotel, dates of stay, and my itinerary. Everything was orchestrated so that I would only see and register exactly what the North Korean regime allowed me to see.

Put simply, the plan was to show all of the positives of the country so that I could relay this to the ‘outside world.’

This state propaganda tour included a trip to the Arch of Triumph and the 50,000-seater Kim Il-sung Stadium, the second-largest arena in capital city Pyongyang. It was there that, at least according to North Koreans, the national football team played Brazil in a 2009 friendly match, in preparation for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. In what was considered a major coup for the government, they had managed to attract the legendary Brazilian national side to Pyongyang — or, at least, so they thought.