The Korea Football Association, the Korea Professional Football League, and the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism are struggling to come up with a plan after prosecutors indicted 10 people, including national team, professional, university, and elementary school leaders, professional team employees, agents, and parents, for backroom deals related to the recruitment of soccer players to professional teams.
The KFA is expected to hold a sports fairness committee soon. The committee is expected to discuss provisional bans on the indicted leaders – Choi Tae-wook, former coach of the men’s national soccer team; Lim Jong-heon, former head coach of Ansan Professional Football Club; Shin Moe, coach of Hwaseong FC (third division); and two former college soccer coaches – as well as their agent, Choi Moe, who was deeply involved in the backroom dealings. Lim, the former coach, and Choi, the agent, are already in custody. “We are considering whether we can impose provisional suspensions on other individuals who are facing trial, pending the court’s final judgment,” the association said.
The KFA removed Choi from the federation’s Technical Study Group (TSG) immediately after the indictment was announced. “It is not realistically easy to immediately discipline professional leaders and employees of professional clubs based on prosecution indictments alone,” the federation said, “and we will discuss whether to further discipline them based on the outcome of the trial process and the judgment of the KFA’s Fairness Committee.”
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the main ministry responsible for managing the KFA and the professional soccer league, is considering ▲ investigating all professional baseball and soccer players ▲ identifying players managed by professional clubs with whom agent Choi Mo-soo dealt ▲ and receiving reports of irregularities such as receiving money as a precondition for joining. Kim Jeong-bae, the full-time vice president of the Korea Football Association, is a former vice minister of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. Discussions between the MOCA and the KFA on countermeasures are expected to go smoothly, leading to meaningful action.
Among university leaders, former soccer coaches at Yonsei University and Soongsil University have been charged with embezzlement. The Korea University Sports Federation (KUSF), which manages, supervises, and supports universities with athletic departments, said, “Sungsil University is a university that receives athletic support from KUSF,” and “there is a clause that can limit the university’s support even if it is indicted by the prosecutor.”바카라사이트
Ansan City is currently conducting an audit of the soccer team and is considering measures such as restricting the work of employees involved in the case and reorganizing their duties. Ansan City officials gave only a principled response, saying, “We will conduct our own audit and strictly deal with any illegal or unfair matters within the club if they are found.”