"How Can Only One Out of Eight Be Right?" ... The South Korea Team Has No Quality, and Even the Sky Has Abandoned It [2026 FIFA World Cup]

[Financial News] Let's be honest. We were not good enough. Losing 0-1 to South Africa, which is ranked 61st in the FIFA World Ranking, without scoring a single goal was a disastrous performance that cannot be dressed up with any excuse. Failing to secure a place in the round of 32 on our own and having to cling to other teams' results was entirely a painful mistake by Hong Myung-bo's side.
Still, no matter how badly we kicked over the table, one cannot help but sigh, "How can this happen?" It is beyond frustration and into despair. Korean football, already lacking in quality, has now been thoroughly abandoned by the heavens as well.
There were a total of nine possible scenarios South Korea could rely on to reach the round of 32. These were the outcomes from other stadiums that would work in our favor. Under the expanded 48-team format, South Korea could still have kept its round-of-32 hopes alive if just three of those nine results had gone our way. That is why statistical outlets had placed South Korea's survival odds at nearly 90 percent.
But once the matches were played, reality turned into a relentless sequence of results that seemed to mock football fans. So far, eight of the nine scenarios have been decided, and only one has matched South Korea's desperate hopes: Spain's 1-0 win over Uruguay.
The other seven results were chillingly perfect in the way they tightened the noose around South Korea's neck. Ecuador pulled off a major upset by beating Germany, while the Japan-Sweden and Australia-Paraguay matches, which had to produce a winner, cruelly ended in draws. Senegal bombarded Iraq 5-0 and ate away at the goal-difference margin. Iran drew with Egypt and pushed South Korea down to the final qualifying spot in eighth place, and even trusted Ghana suffered a comeback loss to Croatia.
The odds of flipping a coin and getting tails seven times in a row. That astonishing and dreadful bad luck has fallen on the fate of South Korean football, which has been pushed to the edge of the cliff.
Of course, some may sneer, "We failed on our own, so who are we to blame?" And that would be fair. It was such a poor performance that we have no right to blame anyone. But in the face of this cruel force of the universe, which denied even the smallest miracle and made seven of the eight dice land wrong, it is impossible to stop the deep sense of emptiness and irritation from rising.
South Korean football has lost both its quality and its luck. The closing stretch of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which burned the hearts of 50 million people to ashes, will go down in history as one of the most miserable and humiliating memories, with even the god of football turning his back completely.
jsi@fnnews.com Jeon Sang-il Reporter