Goals, Delays and Mystery: International Football Coverage on Korean Central Television

If you’re a fan of the English Premier League and live in North Korea, the good news is that coverage of the 2024-2025 season is finally underway on state television, beginning on January 13. But you shouldn’t get too excited. If 2025 is like recent years, only a handful of games will be shown, they’ll be subject to frequent repeats and fans will never get to see which team wins the league.

But perhaps that doesn’t matter too much. With propaganda making its way into almost every aspect of North Korean television, international sports coverage is one of the few moments each day when state TV is not trying to send an overt or underlying message to its viewers, so that may be sufficient to make it enjoyable.

That is not to say that politics never make their way into sports coverage. In fact, choosing which teams and players are televised tends to be politically-driven. During coverage of the 2022 World Cup, for example, South Korea was not featured until it fell out of the tournament, and in 2023, North Korean TV graphics labeled South Korea as “puppets” during coverage of the team’s 4-1 victory in the Women’s Football tournament at the Asian Games. North Korea went on to lose 4-1 to Japan in the final, so perhaps that was payback by the sporting gods.

While the amount of sports broadcast on Korean Central Television (KCTV) is probably greater than it has ever been, the station often waits days or weeks to air events. The competitive international sports rights market likely also puts the country at a disadvantage as its broadcast is relatively poor and there are no paid TV channels, but this could be the basis for a future soft diplomacy effort largely devoid of politics.

Methodology

To analyze football (soccer) coverage on Korean Central Television, we used the author’s archive of North Korean TV broadcasts received via satellite, and a database of TV program schedules compiled by South Korea’s Ministry of Unification. The analysis covered the period from April 2022 to January 2025. The analysis does not cover the digital Sport TV channel. Available information suggests that channel broadcasts for a handful of hours on weekends but does not carry a greater variety of sports than KCTV does, which is available to every home nationwide.

Background

Sports coverage has long had a place on Korean Central Television. It became more important in mid-2022 when, amid a country-wide COVID-19 outbreak, the station almost doubled its daily broadcasting output from 8 hours to 14 hours. On most days, at least an hour of that extra programming was filled with sports—that is still the case today and much of that sport continues to be football.

In 2022, KCTV aired matches from the English, German, French, Spanish and Italian leagues, but since 2023 has settled exclusively on the Premier League, UEFA Champions League and FIFA World Cup.

Today, most afternoons include a sports broadcast in the hour or two immediately before the 5pm news bulletin. While football is the most common sports broadcast, other sports popular in North Korea, such as table tennis, volleyball, power lifting, wrestling, badminton, gymnastics, taekwondo, tennis, judo and longbow, receive airtime as well, although in much more limited coverage.

Football matches are usually shown edited, and 90 minutes of play is typically squeezed into about 60 minutes of programming. On-air graphics in English are overlayed with Korean graphics and any other logos present on the video are blurred. At one stage, KCTV even blurred the pitch-side advertising, but it no longer does that.

Premier League Coverage

Coverage of the current season of the English Premier League began on KCTV on January 13 with a match between Ipswich and Liverpool—150 days after it took place on August 16, 2024. The next game to be broadcast, two days later, was also an August 2024 game. That broadcast was aired 144 days after it was played.

With coverage of the 2024-2025 season having just begun, there is insufficient data available to analyze the current season. However, looking at last year’s coverage reveals that such delays are not unusual.

Each Premier League season consists of 380 regular season games. KCTV carries only a fraction of the games; those that are televised are typically repeated three times or more. Of the games in the 2023-2024 season, only 21 were aired.

The chart below shows each of the 21 games televised, the date they were played, (in green) and the date of the broadcast and repeats (in red).

Figure 5. KCTV coverage of the 2023-2024 Premier League season, showing time between date played and date aired.

The first match that was televised in North Korea was an August 11, 2023, game between Burnley and Manchester City. It was shown on September 27, 2023, 47 days after it was played. The following two football broadcasts were repeats of the same game.

From August 11 to the end of 2023, KCTV aired an additional 16 Premier League matches. All were originally played in August or September; by the end of the year, the time elapsed between the games and their broadcast on KCTV had grown to three months.

It was not until May 2024 that coverage of the Premier League resumed. Rather than jumping forward in the season, coverage picked up with matches played in England in September and October 2023, and reruns of earlier games.

The final match of the season to be broadcast was on September 14, 2024. It was a game between Manchester United and Manchester City originally played on October 29, 2023—a delay of 321 days. But that wasn’t the longest delay. The September 3 match between Liverpool and Aston Villa was repeated for a fifth time on September 2—a year after it was played.

None of the matches from the latter two-thirds of the season were shown.

The selection of games did not cover all the teams. For the 2023-2024 season, excluding repeats, Manchester City was the most televised team with eight of their matches shown on KCTV. Chelsea followed with six matches and Liverpool with four.

Manchester United, supposedly Kim Jong Un’s favorite team, was only televised three times—but if Kim is indeed a fan, he probably is not relying on KCTV to follow the team. While foreign media is banned for almost everyone in North Korea, Kim likely has access to South Korean TV channels that show the matches live, if he wants them.

Several teams were not shown at all: Brentford, Brighton & Hove Albion, Everton, Spurs and Wolves. It is perhaps not a coincidence that three of those teams—Brentford, Spurs and Wolves—were not broadcast, as they have South Korean players in their teams.

A similar pattern played out a year earlier during the 2022-2023 season. Then, KCTV aired 29 of the 380 games, with average delays of around 4 months. None of the games televised were played after February 2023, depriving viewers of the latter parts of the season.

Figure 7. KCTV coverage of the 2022-2023 Premier League season, showing match date played versus match date aired.

UEFA Champions League

In contrast to the Premier League, North Korean TV viewers did see the final stages of the UEFA Champions League—the annual tournament between Europe’s top club teams— but those trying to keep tabs on the contest had to contend with the games being shown out of order.

Coverage of the 2023-2024 championship began with the round-of-16 matches that were played in February and March in Europe. KCTV televised them between July and November.

Most of the 16 games in the round were shown four times but two, the home and away matches between Paris St. Germain (PSG) and Real Sociedad were not shown. This is likely because PSG fields a South Korean player, Lee Kang-in.

At the quarterfinal stage, PSG was again ignored when it played Barcelona and KCTV didn’t air the quarterfinal matches between Arsenal and Bayern Munich, despite showing both teams at the earlier stage.

PSG was finally aired when it reached the semifinal, although the game saw it lose to Borussia Dortmund.

The Champions League final was aired on December 24, almost seven months after it was originally played on June 1 in London. It has since been repeated on January 10.

The chart below shows all of the games that were played from the round of 16 onwards (green) and their air dates on KCTV (red). Games with no red dots were not aired on KCTV.

Figure 9. KCTV coverage of the 2024 UEFA Champions League by games played versus games aired.

FIFA World Cup

One of the underlying constants when analyzing North Korea is that things are often not quite what they seem. The data presented so far appears to suggest that Korean Central Television has difficulty and/or little sense of urgency in turning around international sporting content.

Indeed, the state’s complete control of all media would also suggest that fans are unable to follow contests from week-to-week, so fast coverage probably does not matter.

But KCTV’s coverage of some sporting events demonstrates that whatever the reason for the delays, it is probably not technical.

The TV station closely covered the 2022 World Cup. Games were typically televised one or two days after they were played and, on some days, KCTV broadcast four games a day.

It showed every game of the tournament bar four: all three South Korean games in the group stage and the match between the United States and Wales. The latter might have been for technical reasons, but politics likely dictated the lack of coverage of South Korea. KCTV did show the match where they were knocked out of the tournament by Brazil.

Most of the knockout stage games were broadcast hours after they took place, as was the World Cup Final. Quarter-final and later games were repeated twice during December.

Figure 10. KCTV coverage of 2022 FIFA World Cup, match date versus air date.

Coverage of last year’s Under-20s Women’s World Cup, which took place in Colombia, was also impressive. At the tournament, North Korea beat Austria, Brazil and, on September 18, beat the United States to secure a place in the final. Its impressive progress apparently lit a fire under KCTV, which aired the three winning games on successive nights from September 20.

The team went on to beat Japan 1-0 in the final and become world champions. The game was played in Bogota at 17:00 local time on September 22, which was 07:00 local time in Pyongyang on September 23. KCTV aired the match at 20:30 that evening—a delay of just 13.5 hours.

State media showed scenes of North Koreans watching the match in homes, restaurants, public facilities and on large public TV screens.

Sports TV Rights

Of course, the national team being crowned world champions will always command more local attention than, say, a match between Wolves and Chelsea, but it leaves open the mystery of why the coverage of foreign football looks like it does and especially why is it so late?

KCTV coverage of World Cup games has proved it has the technical ability to receive, edit and air multiple games in a matter of hours or days.

But there is an important difference between the World Cup and other tournaments highlighted here.

In the past, Korean Central Television has worked through the Asian Broadcasting Union to secure rights to the World Cup and the Olympics, usually for no cost, but for European football that does not appear to be the case.

Both the English Premier League and Champions League list Eclat Media Group and its SPOTV channel as rights holders in South Korea, but no rights are listed for North Korea, so how KCTV gets the footage is a mystery.

The long delay between games being played and broadcast could be down to lack of sufficient access, and perhaps that the European championships are just not as important to a North Korean audience as tournaments that they play in.

For organizations wishing to engage North Korea in non-traditional diplomacy, the provision of sporting rights to KCTV could be one way to accomplish that and provide the domestic audience with greater international programming options for their entertainment and enjoyment.