Park Hang-seo Calls the Korea Football Association a 'Cartel'
Park Hang-seo called the Korea Football Association a "cartel" this week — in an interview given from a resort town in Thailand, two months after he resigned from the federation in protest.
Park Hang-seo gave the interview on September 3, sitting down with football commentator Seo Hyung-wook's outlet Footballist in Kanchanaburi, about two hours west of Bangkok. It's the bluntest he's spoken about the federation since South Korea's group-stage exit from the 2026 World Cup.
From a World Cup Apology to This
If you're outside Korea, you probably know Park from Vietnam. He took over a program with no recent international relevance in 2017 and, within a year, had it in the 2018 AFC U-23 Championship final, the Asian Games semifinals, and an AFF Championship title for the first time in a decade. He stayed six years, added two more Southeast Asian Games golds, and got Vietnam into the AFC's final World Cup qualifying round for the first time in the country's history.
He came home to a different kind of job. The KFA named him one of five vice presidents in 2025, and for the 2026 World Cup it put him in charge as the national team's delegation chief, not the coach but the executive responsible for how the squad was run off the pitch. South Korea finished third in Group A with one win and two losses and went out in the group stage. On June 29, Park apologized publicly on the KFA's behalf, saying the federation needed to "prepare for the future again through painful self-reflection and introspection, so that Korean football can make a fresh start." Head coach Hong Myung-bo resigned the same week. Seven days later, Park did too — the only sitting KFA executive to step down over the tournament.
Then he went back to coaching in Thailand. Kanchanaburi Power FC, a Thai League 2 club, named him head coach on May 25 on a two-year deal, with the job of getting the team back up to the top flight; he joined the squad in July once his World Cup duties wrapped. It's also why he was sitting in Kanchanaburi for this interview in the first place, not just passing through. For most of the summer, the move looked like the end of his involvement in Korean football politics.
What He Actually Said
It wasn't.
Two months after quitting, Park told interviewers the KFA's real problem isn't one bad World Cup. It's who runs the place and how. "The KFA was too arrogant," he said. "We have to break the cartel that's there." Asked to be specific, he pointed at the administration itself: "It hasn't changed in a long time." His fix is specific: hand real authority to a named group of younger former players, including Park Ji-sung, Lee Young-pyo, and Park Ju-ho, who already sit on a KFA reform committee. "Good juniors should be the ones designing and leading it," he said.
That's a specific, checkable claim, not a vague call for "change." It also lands differently coming from someone who spent the past year and a half inside the federation as a vice president, not from an outside critic.
The Job Nobody Explained to Him
The soundbite isn't the real story, though. Park says he asked the KFA, before the World Cup even started, what his actual authority as delegation chief was and who he'd report to. Nobody in the room gave him a straight answer. He says that when Hong Myung-bo's resignation was announced, every executive in the room — the KFA president included — already knew the head coach would be apologizing publicly that day, and it was only in that room that someone suggested Park, as delegation chief, ought to apologize too.
He's blunt about the cost of that. South Korea's National Assembly reportedly named Park as a formal witness for its hearing into the federation and called captain Son Heung-min in the lesser status of a reference witness — a move that split Korean public opinion over whether naming the captain, even in that lighter role, was fair. Park has said he regrets not being able to shield the players better, calling it a failure as both delegation chief and a senior figure in the sport.
If you've wondered why Korean football's crises never seem to end with one apology, this is a big part of the answer: a federation that can't tell its own tournament chief what his job is isn't a one-off embarrassment. It's the kind of gap that outlasts a single World Cup cycle.
Does the Timing Actually Matter?
Three days before Park's interview ran, the KFA announced its answer to the coaching vacancy: Robert Moreno, the 48-year-old Spaniard who spent 2014-2017 as Luis Enrique's assistant at Barcelona, followed him to the Spain national team as assistant, then briefly ran the team himself in 2019 — most recently, he was in charge of Russia's FC Sochi through the 2024-25 season. He's in on a short-term deal through November 27, six matches, with an option to extend him through January's Asian Cup if it goes well. The KFA calls it the first head-coach hire in its history run through open recruitment instead of a closed process.
So the federation is, on paper, doing something close to what Park says it needs to do: opening a process that used to run through insiders. Whether that's a real shift or a one-time exception timed to a crisis isn't a question this week answers. The KFA hasn't issued any public response to Park's comments as of this posting.
Moreno's first match is worth watching regardless of how the politics shake out. Korea hosts Ecuador at Suwon World Cup Stadium on September 24, kickoff 8 p.m. KST — 7 a.m. US Eastern, noon in the UK, an unusually livable hour for anyone outside Korea willing to set an early alarm. Four days later, Uruguay comes to Seoul World Cup Stadium for the second of his six-match audition. Neither broadcaster nor streaming rights for the international window are confirmed yet outside Korea; check FIFA+ or your regional sports listings closer to kickoff.
If Moreno wins enough of those six games to earn the Asian Cup extension, Park's interview becomes a footnote to a coaching search that worked. If he doesn't, the KFA is back to square one on the coaching search, and it'll be hard to argue the man who just called them a cartel got it wrong from Thailand.
This is a running news series, not a one-off post — new stories go up twice a day, roughly 7am and 7pm Korea time.
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