North Korea‘s Naegohyang Women’s FC is due to play a South Korean women’s team in Suwon on May 20, the first time Pyongyang has permitted its athletes to travel to the South in more than seven years.

For some, it is an indication that the North is deploying “sports diplomacy” to ease strained bilateral ties.

The rare visit comes as North Korea has framed the South as its “primary foe and invariable principal enemy” in a recently rewritten constitution that removes notions of reunifying the peninsula, which has been divided since the 1950-1953 Korean War. 

Victor Cha, Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, argued in an article published on the CSIS website on May 4 that, “sports diplomacy has always been an important tool of inter-Korean diplomacy.”

Pyongyang allowing the athletes to travel to the South “is significant, given North Korea’s shutdown of all dialogue with South Korea and its assertion of the enemy-state declaration vis-a-vis Seoul,” Cha said.

“In this regard, the football match could demonstrate the potential to separate cultural exchanges from politics,” he added.

The 27-strong North Korean team had been training in Beijing but arrived at Incheon airport on Sunday before travelling on to Suwon, some 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) south of Seoul, ahead of the semi-final of the Asian Football Confederation’s Women’s Champions League.

Signs of improving North-South ties?

While analysts broadly agree that a North Korean team visiting the South is a positive development, they caution against reading too much into Pyongyang’s decision.

“The likelihood of this football match becoming an immediate ‘breakthrough’ in inter-Korean relations is limited,” said Hyobin Lee, a professor at Sogang University in Seoul.

“But I also do not think it is meaningless, and I partially agree with Victor Cha’s analysis,” she told DW.

The first visit by a North Korean women’s football team since the 2014 Incheon Asian Games is “symbolically significant,” Lee noted.

She pointed out that some South Korean politicians have described it as “a possible opportunity to ease tensions in frozen inter-Korean relations.”

The limits of sports diplomacy

South Korean media reported that Unification Minister Chung Dong-young is also considering attending the match.

“There is understandable optimism that a soccer tournament could become a positive case of inter-Korean, people-to-people exchange after an extended suspension,” Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, told DW.

The rare visit by a North Korean women’s football team ​has been approved under the inter-Korean exchange law. All 7,087 tickets made available to the general public sold out within a day.

While Easley thinks it would be premature to call the event “successful sports diplomacy,” North Korea’s participation “could suggest a softening in Pyongyang’s portrayal of Seoul as a hostile enemy.”

Erwin Tan, a professor of international politics at Hankuk University, is more skeptical of the soccer match.

“Inter-Korean sports and cultural events have occurred quite frequently in the past, yet have not led to any diplomatic breakthrough, so I see no reason to see this development as signaling anything new,” Tan told DW.

2018’s missed opportunity

The last time North Korean athletes were in the South was when five table tennis players competed in Incheon, west of Seoul, in December 2018.

That tournament took place nine months after ten North Korean athletes participated in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in the South.

Competitors from both countries took part in the opening ceremony under the Korean unification flag, and Kim Yo-jong, Kim Jong Un’s sister, headed a high-level delegation from Pyongyang.

And while the games appeared to herald a brighter diplomatic outlook, the cross-border relationship soon soured.

Kim Jong Un has since ditched the reunification rhetoric. Pyongyang has altered its constitution to codify its “hostile two-state” policy. 

Lee believes the North’s participation in the 2018 Winter Olympics “should be viewed as a limited but short-lived success” that ultimately fell short because of the collapse of the nuclear summit between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in Hanoi in 2019 and “growing distrust between Washington and Pyongyang.”

However, Pyongyang agreeing to send the team south allows the country “to project an image to the international community that it is not completely isolated or closed off,” she added. 

What else could have prompted Pyongyang to send its athletes?

Lee believes Pyongyang has a number of reasons beyond attempting to encourage a diplomatic thaw for agreeing to send the team south.

She notes that since sports exchanges are politically less risky than formal diplomatic negotiations, these kinds of events are “useful for testing limited engagement.”

“There is likely a propaganda dimension as well,” she said. “North Korea has long used international sports participation as a way to promote national prestige and regime legitimacy domestically.”

It is also possible that Pyongyang wants to preserve “selective channels of communication with the South rather than completely severing all forms of contact,” Lee told DW.

“In that sense, the match may signal that North Korea is leaving a small diplomatic door open, even while maintaining its broader hardline stance,” she added.

Edited by: Emmy Sasipornkarn