The Korean Football Association (KFA), the organization that manages the South Korean national soccer team, apologized this week for “inappropriate conduct” and various controversies” after being accused of paying for “sexual entertainment” for foreign referees.
The allegations date back to 2011 and 2012, which the KFA emphasized, but nonetheless follow a disastrous year for the association punctuated by the national team failing to get out of the group stage of the FIFA World Cup. With multiple star players active in top European leagues on the team, South Korean soccer fans blamed the team’s coach at the time, Hong Myung-bo, for being incompetent — and the KFA for hiring a coach that had failed to produce results for the national team a decade before. The outreach became so pervasive that South Korea’s president, Lee Jae-myung, apologized for the World Cup performance and promised government action to ensure it did not happen again. Hong has since fled the country, reportedly to California.
Hong and the current leadership of the KFA do not appear to be involved in the current scandal.
In its statement this week, according to Australia’s ABC broadcaster, the KFA did not name the “sexual favors” controversy by name, but apologized vaguely for inappropriate actions taken by the association in recent memory — mentioning also the World Cup fiasco.
“Our association, which ought to bring joy and exhilaration to football fans through the fierce pursuit of goals and the fair sportsmanship that emerges in the process, has recently lost sight of its fundamental purpose and finds itself in a truly dire situation,” the KFA said in its apology statement. While recognizing “media reports regarding events from over a decade ago that even many of our own staff members were unaware of,” it clarified that the reports were old and not reflective of behavior KFA officials are engaging in today.
“We wish to clearly state that such inappropriate conduct or misuse of corporate cards is absolutely not occurring at the association at present,” the KFA emphasized.
The allegations were published on Thursday by the Korean media outlet JTBC, citing an alleged investigation by the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism in 2016. According to the report, evidence existed that the KFA spent hundreds of thousands of won, the national currency, on corporate credit cards at “massage parlors” where foreign referees were offered “sexual entertainment.” Some reports described the massage parlors, located in Seoul, Changwon, and Ulsan, as “adult entertainment centers.”
The incidents occurred in 2011 and 2012 and reportedly involved as many as a dozen foreign national referees. They also appeared to precede critical South Korean national team matches. JTBC reportedly did not confirm that the “sexual entertainment” affected the outcome of the matches in question, though they naturally bring into question the authenticity of the scores and any referee activity in them.
The Korea JoongAng Daily, a JTBC affiliate, shared that the original bombshell report included a statement from an unnamed KFA official at the time who stated that the apparent corruption was “something that was customary at the time.” KFA itself reportedly issued a comment to JTBC reading, in part, “there may have been unfortunate incidents 15 years ago, but we have since implemented strict internal guidelines and are making every effort to prevent anything like that from happening again.”
The South Korean Culture, Sports, and Tourism Ministry launched an advisory committee known as the K-Football Reform Commission in July following the World Cup disaster. The co-chair of the commission, Park Ji-sung, emphasized on Wednesday that his commission could not “handle at all” the 2011 massage parlor allegations, but nonetheless offered, “it is certainly true that we are facing an unfortunate situation.”
While seemingly unrelated, the recent allegations add to a climate of outrage at South Korean soccer fueled by the national team winning only one match during the 2026 FIFA World Cup in North America, arriving home early with two losses. Hong had served as coach once before, in 2014, and is the only coach in national team history to have been given a second chance after a lackluster performance at the head of the team. His hiring in 2024 was highly controversial; many fans accused the KFA of choosing a South Korean coach of inferior quality and not taking prospective coaches from foreign countries seriously. The scandal was so prominent that the South Korean National Assembly, the federal legislature, interrogated Hong and KFA officials about his second hiring at the time.
This time, the Ministry of Culture and Sport has launched its reform commission and President Lee has vowed yet-to-be-determined measures to improve the quality of the KFA. In a social media statement in June, Lee apologized to South Korea for the soccer team’s poor performance and described himself as experiencing “not just confusion but utter bewilderment” at how badly the team played.
“Since participating in a World Cup requires a lot of taxpayers’ money and other national resources, I would like to ask the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism to identify and analyze the cause of the problem and prepare measures to prevent recurrences,” he announced.
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