If finally Kim Yong’s dreams are fulfilled and North Korea becomes a kind of Asian Benidorm, the first foreign tourists who arrive can take some surprise. For example, if they sit on a terrace to take something and expect to see an international football match, it will be difficult for them to see the Spanish or the Italian league. There you only see the Premier League, although in its own way.
Devotion for the Premier. The Guardian told this week in a report. For a country as suspicious of external influences such as North Korea, the nation seems unable to resist the attractiveness of football, and expressly of the Premier League of England, the most watched sport (and one of the few) on the screens of Television of the country.
The result, as we will see, is a “medium” and little legal access to the parties, a viewing marked by strong restrictions, censorship and a significant delay in transmissions, as detailed in an analysis of site 38 North.
Delays and modifications. To begin with, the premiere broadcasts on North Korean television are not live and are usually transmitted with considerable delay. For example, the first broadcast of the 2024-25 season began on January 13, with a match between the Ipswich and the Liverpool that had been played … 150 days before.
There are more. The footage of each party is edited and reduced from the original 90 minutes one hour, eliminating politically inconvenient pauses and moments, whether advertising or other signal that the regime does not approve. In addition, any graphic in English is replaced by signs in Korean, and the logos of foreign chains are blurred to hide their origin. Of course, the Guardian said that, although in the past censorship came to hide advertising in the stadiums, this practice seems to have been abandoned.
Another peculiarity is that the full season is not broadcast. In the 2023-24 season, for example, only 21 games were issued, and these were repeated in a loop on multiple occasions. In other words, the lack of a complete calendar prevents North Korean viewers from knowing who wins the league, since the games are not transmitted in chronological order.
They leave that to the imagination of the spectators.
No trace of the neighbor. The ideological filter of the Kim Jong-un regime is also reflected in the selection of the matches that are issued. The teams where South Korean soccer players play, such as Hwang Hee-chan (Wolverhampton), the Super star are Heung-Min (Tottenham) or Kim Ji-Soo (Brentford), do not appear in programming. As the regime considers South Korea its “hostile state number one”, any reference to its athletes is excluded.
And it is not new. This censorship has already been applied in previous tournaments. During the 2022 World Cup, KCTV transmitted all the games a few hours late, except the three matches of the South Korean groups and the confrontation between the United States and Wales. Of course, the regime did not hesitate to show the elimination of South Korea at the hands of Brazil. And in the 2023 Asian Women’s Tournament, the North Korean TV graphics labeled South Korean players as “puppets.”
And how do you access the North Korea signal? The Nation does not have the issuance rights of the Premier League or the Champions League, which implies that the issuance of these parties should be a violation of the international sanctions directed against the nuclear and ballistic missile programs of the country. The truth is that the report is not clear how KCTV obtains the recordings, but it is presumed that it is a license without a license.
In fact, in the past, North Korea also transmitted matches of the Leagues of England, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, but since 2023 has reduced its approach to the Premier League, the Champions League and the World Cup.
Soccer and propaganda. Although North Korean state television is dominated by news with a revolutionary tone, war films and propaganda on the Kim dynasty, football continues to represent one of the few moments of entertainment without an explicit ideological message.
An obsession with football in the nation that is not new. North Korea reached the quarterfinals of the 1966 World Cup after beating Italy in a historic match, and its women’s team has won the U-20 World Cup up to three times. So, despite censorship and restrictions, football is still an escape valve for North Korean viewers.
Even if they never get to know the Premier League champion.
Imagen | (stephan), 38 North
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