South Korea

South Korea arrive at this World Cup as a side that everyone underrates because of where their headline stars play, and everyone slightly overrates because of who their headline stars are. Son Heung-min, who left Tottenham as a Premier League Golden Boot winner and 2024-25 Europa League champion before his MLS-record $26.5M move to LAFC, is 33 and unmissable; he has scored 12 goals in 13 LAFC games and won the 2025 MLS Goal of the Year. Kim Min-jae is a starting centre-back at Bayern Munich. Lee Kang-in starts in midfield at PSG. Hwang Hee-chan is a Premier League regular at Wolves. On individual talent, this is one of the deepest Korean squads ever assembled. The problem is what happens to it as a collective when the opposition presses, and the recent friendly losses to Ivory Coast and Austria (five goals conceded across two games) confirmed long-held suspicions that Hong Myung-bo’s defensive structure remains brittle.

The schedule will determine everything. Korea opens against Czechia in Guadalajara on 11 June at altitude (1,566 m) — exactly the reason Hong moved the squad to Salt Lake City on 18 May for an altitude camp. A win here would change Korea’s entire trajectory; a loss would put their fate in the hands of needing a result against Mexico in front of 87,000 hostile fans at the Azteca on 18 June. The closing match against South Africa in Monterrey on 24 June is the swing fixture — both sides will probably need a result, and the historical record (3W-1L for Korea across four meetings) modestly favours them. Predictive models put Korea’s odds of advancing at around 53%, but those models are pre-altitude and pre-friendly losses; the realistic read is closer to 40%.

The realistic ceiling is the Round of 16, available if Korea finish second behind Mexico. The floor is a third-place finish on tiebreakers, agonisingly outside the best-third cutoff. The most-likely outcome under current form is a Korea win or draw against South Africa, a competitive loss against either Mexico or Czechia, and a third-place exit by goal difference. For Son, who turns 34 in July, this is almost certainly the last World Cup he will play in — Korea’s 2030 cycle will be in Hwang Hee-chan’s, Lee Kang-in’s and Bae Jun-ho’s hands. Korean football needs Son to leave with a knockout match memory, and the entire psychic weight of the Korean tournament will rest on whether Hong’s 4-2-3-1 can hold a clean sheet against any of Group A’s other three sides — which it has not done in any meaningful match since the autumn of 2025.

South Korea arrive at their 12th consecutive World Cup carrying a mix of pedigree and quiet anxiety. The squad Hong Myung-bo unveiled on 16 May at the KT Gwanghwamun West Building in Seoul is, on paper, one of the most credentialed Korean rosters in history: Bayern Munich’s Kim Min-jae anchors the back line, PSG’s Lee Kang-in is the No.10, and captain Son Heung-min — fresh off lifting the Europa League with Tottenham in 2025 before his $26.5M MLS-record move to LAFC — leads what is almost certainly his fourth and final World Cup at age 33. Son has been in scintillating form since moving to MLS, scoring 12 goals in 13 LAFC games and winning the 2025 MLS Goal of the Year, and the entire Korean tournament now revolves around extracting one more month of vintage Son.

Tactically, Hong has gradually moved away from the older Klinsmann/Bento possession identity toward a slightly more pragmatic 4-2-3-1 with Hwang In-beom (Feyenoord) and Paik Seung-ho (Birmingham City) screening the back four and Son drifting from the left half-space onto his right foot. Lee Kang-in operates centrally with licence to roam, and Hwang Hee-chan provides direct running off the opposite flank. The issue is what happens when possession is lost. In recent friendlies, Hong’s side conceded five goals across defeats to Ivory Coast and Austria in March/April — a worrying preview of how this defence might be exposed by Mexico’s transition attacks or Czechia’s aerial dominance. The German-born naturalised midfielder Jens Castrop, called up to Borussia Mönchengladbach, is one of Hong’s bigger experiments and may feature as a hybrid full-back/midfielder.

Qualification was nominally smooth — six wins and four draws across the third round of AFC qualifying, never beaten — but Korean media spent much of late 2025 dissecting three consecutive draws in the middle of that campaign as evidence the team lacks killer instinct against organised mid-blocks. That’s exactly what South Africa and Czechia will offer in Group A. The squad has spent the last week-plus at a high-altitude training camp in Salt Lake City after departing Seoul on 18 May, an explicit acclimatisation choice ahead of the opener in Guadalajara (1,566 m) against Czechia on 11 June.

Korea’s World Cup history is the strongest in Asia: fourth place in 2002 (Hong’s own playing legacy), Round of 16 in 2010 and 2022, group-stage exits in 2006, 2014 and 2018. Hong was the manager in 2014 — a campaign that ended in a humiliating winless group exit in Brazil and his resignation — and this is openly understood, in Korea, as his second chance at the tournament he failed twelve years ago. Predictive models put Korea’s chance of advancing at around 53%, with most expecting them to finish third and fight for a best-third-place spot. The realistic ceiling for this side is a Round of 16 run if the draw kind to them; the floor is a third-place finish in the group with one win and a fade-out, which would feel anticlimactic given Son’s farewell narrative.

Hong Myung-bo is, by some measures, the greatest Asian footballer of his era and is now back in the manager’s chair he resigned from in disgrace twelve years ago. As a player, he was the captain and sweeper of the South Korean side that reached the 2002 World Cup semi-finals on home soil — the only Asian nation ever to do so — and finished third in the Ballon d’Or-equivalent FIFA Bronze Ball voting. He earned 136 caps, played at four World Cups (1990, 1994, 1998, 2002), and is enshrined in Asian football history alongside Cha Bum-kun. His move into coaching took him through the South Korea U-23s (bronze at London 2012 after that immortal playoff win over Japan) and then up to the senior job in 2013, which ended after a torrid 2014 World Cup in Brazil — three group-stage games, no wins, only one goal scored, and a national tabloid scandal involving criticism over selection of his former Pohang player Park Chu-young.

Hong rebuilt his coaching reputation patiently. After a brief, unhappy 2017-18 in the Chinese second tier with Hangzhou Greentown, he returned to Korea in December 2020 to take charge of Ulsan Hyundai. What followed was statistical proof that 2014 had been an aberration: a second-place K League finish in 2021, then back-to-back league titles in 2022 and 2023 — Ulsan’s first championships in 17 years — plus an AFC Champions League final in 2022. By the time the Korean Football Association came calling in July 2024 (replacing the underwhelming German interim Jürgen Klinsmann), Hong had banked unimpeachable domestic credibility.

His tactical preference is a 4-2-3-1 with a clear hierarchy: Hwang In-beom and Paik Seung-ho hold; Son drifts in from the left half-space; Lee Kang-in conducts from a central 10 role; and Hwang Hee-chan attacks the right channel. He’s more pragmatic than his 2013-14 self, having seen at Ulsan what bus-parking opponents in the Asian Champions League can do to over-committed possession teams. He defers heavily to Son as captain — visibly — and that working relationship has been quietly tested during qualifying when Korea drew three matches in a row against ostensibly weaker AFC opposition and pundits started suggesting Son should drop deeper. Hong refused, and the team eventually finished its third-round group unbeaten with six wins and four draws.

The personal redemption arc is unmistakable. Hong has spoken in Korean-language interviews about 2014 as “the lowest point of my football life” and about treating 2026 as “the one I owe the country.” He is the only manager in this World Cup who played at the host country in his own playing era (he played at the 1994 World Cup in the USA), and that quiet familiarity with the climate has informed his decision to set up a pre-tournament training camp in Salt Lake City from 18 May for altitude acclimatisation. The realistic ceiling for him is the Round of 16, which would be a respectable bookend to his coaching career — at 57 with two K League titles and the World Cup spot already in the bank, he could plausibly walk away from international football after this regardless of outcome.