“There is not a single opinion that is accepted, so why go there?”
That was the question I asked a member of the Korea Football Association’s National Power Enhancement Committee recently when I asked him if he was attending the meeting. The KFA was scheduled to meet this week to evaluate the results of the 2023 Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Asian Cup.
More troubling is the status of national team coach Jürgen Klinsmann (60-Germany). He left for the United States, where he is based, on Tuesday. He had arrived in the country on the night of August 8th. It is not yet known if Klinsmann will attend the evaluation meeting. It could be a meeting to evaluate the Asian Cup performance without him. Some members of the committee have said, “Why are you holding such a meeting, should you go?
The Strength and Conditioning Committee is the successor to the National Head Coach Selection Committee, which was created in December 2017. It is responsible for selecting the head coach of the national team, including the A team, as well as the age-group teams, and providing input on team management. Currently, there are six members, including Park Tae-ha (56), head coach of the Pohang Steelers, and Choi Yun-gyeom (62), head coach of Cheongju FC. However, since the appointment of Michael Muller (59-Germany) as the new chairman in January last year, the organization has become virtually invisible. “The committee members feel that Müller only communicates with the top of the federation, and that the committee members are like scarecrows,” said an association official.
The new commission has been creaking since its first task: selecting a director. It hasn’t met in person since Mueller took over on Jan. 25 last year. There have been two video conferences, excluding the meeting in person. He had less to say than in person. And we don’t know what’s going on. This is because Mueller has not disclosed which directors he is in contact with, citing security reasons. “When he was appointing his predecessor, Paulo Bento, he laid out a portfolio of all the candidates and the commissioners argued among themselves. “We need to know who it is so we can have an opinion or not,” said one commissioner, but in the end, Müller reportedly didn’t even reveal his shortlist.
The 2018 committee, led by Kim Pan Gon (55, current head coach of Malaysia), set clear criteria, including experience winning league titles and qualifying for World Cups, and communicated back and forth with the committee members before selecting Paulo Bento (55, Portugal). Bento led his country to their second-ever away World Cup round of 16 in Qatar in 2022.
On Feb. 27 of last year, Muller announced that the committee would convene at 4 p.m. that day. He then announced the appointment of Klinsmann on the spot. The commissioners were reportedly not very vocal, as they were denied the right to comment on several 메이저토토사이트 occasions. “There was talk among the commissioners that Mueller had no authority, and that he was simply informing them of the coach chosen from above,” said one soccer insider. Less than 30 minutes after the meeting, a press release was sent out to journalists announcing Klinsmann’s appointment.
Even after the coach’s appointment, the empowerment committee did not function properly. The committee meets regularly to discuss the management of the national team. In fact, in 2019, Vento met with the committee and decided to call the then 18-year-old Lee Kang-in (23-Paris Saint-Germain) to the A squad. However, after Klinsmann took over, no meeting was held. A time and place was even set last fall, only to be canceled a few days beforehand due to Klinsmann’s schedule.
Klinsmann has been criticized for his “no-tactics” throughout his tenure, and the team has failed to achieve its promised goal of winning the Asian Cup. Despite leading some of the best players in Europe, including Son Heung-min (32, Tottenham), Lee Kang-in, Hwang Hee-chan (28, Wolverhampton), and Kim Min-jae (28, Bayern Munich), he played a one-sided game against inferior opponents. After the tournament, there were calls for Klinsmann to be sacked. Klinsmann’s contract runs until the World Cup in North and Central America. He has two years and four months left. If Klinsmann were to be replaced, the club would reportedly have to pay around 7 billion won in penalties.