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Forget the World Cup—the Most Important Soccer Match Is Happening in Korea This Week
A rare inter-Korean women’s soccer match offers something the Korean Peninsula desperately needs: hope.
May 18, 2026
As the world begins turning its attention toward this summer’s FIFA World Cup, an even more meaningful soccer event is taking place this week in Korea.
Pyongyang-based Naegohyang Women’s Football Club faces Suwon FC Women in the semifinals of the Asian Football Confederation Women’s Champions League in South Korea—marking the first time North Korea has sent athletes to South Korea to compete since 2018. Some 200 South Korean civic groups have formed a 3,000-strong cheering squad for the historic inter-Korean match, and South Korea’s government set aside 300 million won ($202,000) in government funds to support the cheering squad.
For many, this may sound like a niche sports story. But Korea peace activists recognize this as one of the most hopeful openings in years.
For decades, inter-Korean relations have been defined internationally through the language of crisis: missile tests, nuclear threats, military drills, and sanctions. Diplomacy, meanwhile, has too often been treated as politically risky or naïve.
As Korean peace advocates, we know that openings are few and far between, and we cannot afford to miss this window of opportunity. Soccer may be a spectator sport, but people-led peacebuilding efforts require us all to participate.
But history tells a different story.
Time and again, engagement between North and South Korea has succeeded in reducing tensions and creating opportunities for dialogue. The last major period of inter-Korean diplomacy began not with weapons negotiations, but with athletes marching together.
At the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, athletes from North and South Korea entered the opening ceremony side by side under the Korean Unification Flag after a series of talks between then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The image captured global attention and helped catalyze one of the most diplomatically active periods on the peninsula in years, including inter-Korean summits at Panmunjom and unprecedented US-North Korea diplomacy.
Soccer, in particular, has long served as a bridge. North and South Korean men’s and women’s teams have faced each other numerous times since 1946—even before the Korean War officially began. North Korea also sent women footballers to compete in South Korea during the 2014 Asian Games, and North Korean athletes last traveled south in 2018 for an inter-Korean table tennis event. In their 1996 World Cup run, North Korea men’s team challenged Cold War stereotypes as they made a stunning upset victory over Italy’s team, an episode explored in the documentary The Game of Their Lives.
These exchanges allow ordinary Koreans to encounter one another—and the global community—outside the framework of hostility and forever war. Moments like this have the power to catalyze efforts for change.
As Korean American women advocating for peace in Korea, we have seen firsthand how engagement efforts can break through where militarized approaches have failed us repeatedly.
The Korean War never officially ended. Americans are often shocked to learn that the war was only temporarily suspended with a ceasefire armistice in 1953, making it the United States’ longest-running overseas conflict. For over 70 years, divided families and everyday people have borne the costs of ongoing conflict.
Relentless sanctions and isolation have failed to produce denuclearization, reconciliation, or lasting stability. Instead, they have entrenched mistrust, division, and forever war. In recent years, discussion about North Korea in the United States has become trapped between cynicism and alarmism.
This has all culminated in today’s bleak political landscape: Inter-Korean relations are deeply frozen. North Korea has renounced reunification, and under South Korea’s former administration, Seoul increasingly labeled the North a principal enemy. Communication has stalled, tensions have escalated, and diplomacy has all but disappeared.
But political landscapes can change quickly. Following the impeachment of far-right leader Yoon Suk Yeol and the election of Lee Jae-myung, Seoul has increasingly called for renewed inter-Korean dialogue with Pyeongyang, and Pyeongyang has indicated some willingness to engage.
That is why this week’s soccer match matters.
Of course, no single game or summit will solve the security crisis in Korea. But the game demonstrates the importance of engagement—especially during periods of deep political freeze. And importantly, this moment comes through women. Women have consistently been at the forefront of peacebuilding efforts on the peninsula—from family reunification advocacy to feminist peace movements calling for a formal end to the Korean War.
These developments raise the question: Will Washington continue defaulting to the same failed approach of maximum pressure and isolation, or will it support the growing desire among US voters who want an end to forever war and peace with North Korea?
As Korean peace advocates, we know that openings are few and far between, and we cannot afford to miss this window of opportunity. Soccer may be a spectator sport, but people-led peacebuilding efforts require us all to participate.
Policymakers should build upon this moment to support initiatives that lower tensions, remove the threat of nuclear war, and expand opportunities for contact between ordinary people—including cultural exchanges, athletic competitions, humanitarian cooperation, and renewed inter-Korean dialogue. This includes ending the US travel ban to North Korea, which is up for renewal this August.
Peace is not built in a single summit or event, but gradually through relationships, trust building, and repeated acts of engagement. While this week’s match in Suwon will last only 90 minutes, if we are wise enough to recognize its significance, its meaning could endure far longer.
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The NBA's Other Human Rights Quagmire
The league must rethink its commercial partnership with Rwanda, whose army and senior officials the US government recently sanctioned for backing a deadly armed group that is committing “horrific human rights abuses.”
May 10, 2026
As an iconic sports league with a deep historic commitment to social justice, two of the National Basketball Association’s commercial branding relationships contradict the league’s values.
Questions are being raised about the branding deal the NBA struck with the United Arab Emirates, ignoring the killer drones and other support it is sending to a militia which the United Nations found to be committing genocide in Sudan.
Much less critical attention has been paid to the NBA’s commercial partnership with Rwanda, whose army and senior officials the US government recently sanctioned for backing a deadly armed group that is committing “horrific human rights abuses.” Rwanda has been a central partner in the Basketball Africa League (BAL), the NBA’s first professional basketball league outside North America. The Rwandan government pays the NBA between $6 million and $7 million annually to be a sponsor and to host some of the BAL playoffs. And Rwanda’s national airline is the official travel partner for the BAL.
The Los Angeles Clippers signed their own sponsorship deal with Rwanda last year. “Visit Rwanda” is their official jersey patch sponsor, so it appears on all uniforms. There is “Visit Rwanda” branding in the Clippers’ arena, and it is the official coffee sponsor for the team.
The NBA and the Clippers have some uncomfortable decisions to make. Should they continue to accept money from a government that is in large part responsible for one of the largest humanitarian emergencies in the world?
The uncomfortable truth for the NBA and the Clippers is that Rwanda invaded eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2022 and dramatically escalated its invasion last year, deploying up to 12,000 troops and backing a very violent proxy rebel group known as the M23. Under Rwandan command and control, the M23 has committed extensive human rights abuses, including mass killings targeted at certain ethnic groups, torture, and forced deportations. Over 5 million people in DRC are now displaced from their homes due to the conflict, and 10 million people are now at risk of starvation, as M23 “has driven farmers from their land… and blocked food imports.”
NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum responded to a bipartisan letter from US senators in September 2024, "If American policies were to change regarding business activities in and relating to Rwanda or any other BAL market, our actions would, of course, change accordingly."
Therein lies the rub. US policy on Rwanda has changed suddenly and significantly over the last two months, with major implications for the NBA’s close involvement with Rwanda. Just days following the signing of a peace accord between Rwanda and DRC brokered by the US and overseen by President Donald Trump last December, Rwanda and its proxy force launched a new, bloody offensive that left 200,000 more civilians displaced. Instead of pulling back to make peace, Rwanda doubled down on war right after telling the White House it would do the opposite.
The breach of the peace agreement has since led to a major shift in long-standing US policy on Rwanda. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in December that “Rwanda’s actions are… a clear violation of the Washington Accords…, and the United States will take action to ensure promises made to the President are kept.” US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz then argued that “Rwanda is leading the region… toward more war.”
The US government has followed up with a series of actions, including placing sanctions on the entire Rwandan army, visa restrictions on senior Rwandan officials, suspending a US-Rwanda health agreement, and canceling an investment conference and negotiations with Rwanda over a new development finance project.
M23 forces continue to occupy nearly all strategic areas of eastern DRC, Rwanda maintains 7,000 troops there, and the conflict is deepening. Notably, the DRC government is also responsible for many human rights abuses, and it must halt its partnerships with deadly armed groups.
Rwanda is also profiting from the deadly trade in illicit gold and other minerals from eastern DRC, minerals that provide fuel for the conflict. Rwanda-backed M23 occupies key gold and critical minerals mines and exports the minerals to Rwanda. Despite having no major domestic gold mines, Rwanda is estimated to have skyrocketed its gold exports to $2 billion in 2025, a more than five-fold increase from four years ago. Ironically, most of their smuggled gold exports go to the UAE, the other major NBA partner.
Because of Rwanda’s heinous behavior in eastern DRC, several major sports teams have recently halted their partnerships with the Rwandan government following campaigns from human rights groups. The English soccer club Arsenal ended its commercial branding deal with Rwanda following a campaign by the group Gunners for Peace, as did German soccer giant Bayern Munich.
The NBA’s main defense of its commercial partnership with Rwanda has been that its dealings have been consistent with US policy. That policy has now changed in response to Rwanda’s unwillingness to end its greed-fueled military intervention in DRC.
The NBA and the Clippers have some uncomfortable decisions to make. Should they continue to accept money from a government that is in large part responsible for one of the largest humanitarian emergencies in the world? Should they continue to be part of Rwanda’s strategy of “sportswashing” its image? Can they follow in the footsteps of Arsenal and Bayern Munich and drop Rwanda’s commercial branding sponsorship? These questions won’t garner the same attention as gambling players and tanking teams, but the stakes for millions of Congolese lives couldn’t be greater.
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Is Trump the 21st Century's Top Jock?
Donald Trump seems to suck the air out of every arena. Is that why those apparitional figures from SportsWorld seem to have disappeared from our collective consciousness in the age of You Know Who?
Apr 18, 2026
Seventy-five years ago, my father and I gazed down from the stands at Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle in the outfield at Yankee Stadium. I was thrilled by the sight of two heroes of my time, but Dad was not impressed. He had seen Babe Ruth.
I think about that now, in a time desperate for such symbolic representatives of our better selves, which we once derived from sports figures like Mickey, Joe, and the Babe. They distracted us from pain and poverty. They gave us hope. I wonder if the answer to “Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?”—that line from Simon and Garfunkel’s famed song “Mrs. Robinson”—is the same as to so many other wrenching questions these days: Donald Trump.
Consider the following: Until he wore himself (and his welcome) out with such excess, he was indeed superb at commanding attention and winning ugly. He was, in short, a loud, vulgar, greedy, self-absorbed cock of the walk who came to epitomize a new gilded age of power and irresponsibility. And yet, he also somehow came to represent citizens who felt oppressed and disdained by the new elite.
No, you’ve got it wrong. I’m not thinking about Donald Trump (not yet anyway). I’m describing Babe Ruth, the first of the Top Jock role models who captured the spirit of an American age. For the next hundred years, the Babe’s spawn strutted through America’s arenas until they petered out in basketball star Michael Jordan’s commercialism. Jordan was, like the rest of them, the best at what he did, while also embodying the zeitgeist of his time with a “greed is good” mantra exemplified by his notorious “Republicans buy sneakers, too” line (which he may never have said seriously).
Now, of course, we have DJT (Donald J. Trump) as the MVP (most valuable player) of, it seems, every competition.
From Babe Ruth to Michael Jordan, with the likes of Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Arnold Palmer, Joe Namath, Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Dale Earnhardt, and Tiger Woods (among others) in between, Americans have regularly, if sometimes controversially, used sports figures to represent their aspirations.
Anointing Donald Trump as our current Top Jock figure is neither an attempt to curry favor—do you think I want to be the Minister of Sport?—nor an attempt to denigrate the position. It’s just an effort to better understand why those apparitional figures from SportsWorld seem to have disappeared from our collective consciousness in the age of You Know Who.
Where Did the Top Jocks Go?
This effort of mine started to take shape when I suddenly realized that, for the first time (in my memory) since childhood, America now seems to have no Top Jock, no celebrity athlete whose talent and personality captures our moment. Those who might be considered—LeBron James, Tom Brady, and Serena Williams—somehow seem to lack the sort of charisma Donald Trump does indeed have to reach beyond their hardcore fans to the rest of us.
After almost 70 years of following sports and writing about it professionally, I recently realized that I couldn’t recall another time when I wouldn’t have been able to name an already agreed-upon Top Jock, or at least propose half a dozen candidates. So, what’s up? In this fragmented Trumpian moment of ours, is sports finally losing its hold on us? Have we been losing our love for jocks for the first time in my memory? After all, highly accomplished athletes like Pete Rose and Barry Bonds are now being denied Hall of Fame plaques on moral grounds, while high school and college athletes are becoming teenage millionaires thanks to new laws regarding their ownership of their own images.
It seemed like an appropriate moment for summing up.
Having spent the past 20 years as TomDispatch‘s Jock Culture correspondent, I felt the need for a reckoning. What had I learned from the 50 essays I’d written so far? Was there any kind of personal touchdown I could point to? Had I truly caught the relationship between sports and the larger society—how they do or don’t reflect, direct, or motivate each other? Can I still face the issue of trans athletes or what rules there might be for which kinds of non-athletic transgressions should keep players out of sports halls of fame, or even explain how pro football and basketball have now essentially become Black sports? Must I keep analyzing the symbolism of games rather than just enjoying them? Can I feel comfortable in a world where brain trauma is treated as a reasonable cost of violent entertainment (much as school shootings are a permissible price for gun love)?
And, yes, I came to wonder just where Joe DiMaggio had gone and whether some other charismatic avatar of a fanatical cult might, in fact, have replaced him and all those other jock idols?
More than politicians (even Franklin D. Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy) or entertainers (Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, or the Beatles), sports figures—maybe because of the shooting star nature of their professional lives—had long been designated the avatars of American culture. And that was true even if, with the rarest of exceptions (perhaps Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali), they left little of lasting spiritual value or impact.
And now, of course, we have DJT (Donald J. Trump) as the MVP (most valuable player) of, it seems, every competition. I suspect that he—or at least the world he represents—is the reason why we have no real sporting heroes anymore. After all, he sucks all the air out of all arenas, while providing an ongoing reality show that seems to fill our days and nights, superseding sports in every way imaginable.
Donald Trump eternally demands to be the GOAT—the Greatest of All Time—while distinctly turning our world into a Trumpian sports event.
Suggesting a Theory
I was surprised to find that, in most of the 50 essays I’d written for TomDispatch, whether they were purportedly about baseball, NASCAR, or the Super Bowl, there was always at least a passing reference to Donald Trump and, in all too many cases, he was the leading character. That led me to wonder whether such a reality just represented this particular writer’s obsession or had Trump truly enveloped our collective consciousness?
And, I wondered as well: Was this inevitable? According to AI, when I tried to use it recently, I’ve described Jock Culture as helping to ingrain “the national psyche… with exclusivity, sexism, homophobia, and winning at any cost… a danger to the common good,” while I evidently predicted that “society will become a darker, more despotic place if it continues unchecked.”
There’s no question that the United States has become a significantly darker, more despotic place since, on January 17, 2017, just-about-to-be-president Donald Trump first appeared in a Jock Culture column of mine (the 17th, if you’re keeping count). The headline was “Football Is Trump Ball Lite” and heralded an authentic call for democracy from an unlikely place, the most Trumpish of sports.
As I wrote then:
Pro football actually helped prepare us for the new president’s upset victory by normalizing a basic tenet of jock culture: Anyone not on the team is an enemy, the Other. And it’s open season on opponents, the fans of opponents, critics, and women (unless they’re cheerleaders or moms). Trash talking is the lingua franca of this Trumpian moment, bullying the default tactic.
Yet pro football has also provided us with the single most vivid image of current American resistance to racism. Last summer, before a pre-season game, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem as a symbol of his refusal "to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color."
The outcome, however, would prove shocking. Trump, who entered the Oval Office three days after that column of mine appeared, won two of his three matches, while Kaepernick never played again after that 2016-2017 season.
Maybe we shouldn’t have been shocked, though. Maybe the predictors never got the odds right. Maybe they didn’t understand what we wanted from our sports idols—or what their limits were. How about this: Consider the relative paucity of sports figures in the Epstein Files, especially compared to groups like academics, financiers, politicians, and even comedians. Jeffrey Epstein pursued people who could be useful to him as enablers, investors, connectors, or victims. Woody Allen was high on the list, but there was no Lebron James or Tom Brady (although Brady’s long-time owner, billionaire Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots, certainly made the cut).
Was it because celebrity athletes have no need of being set up with playthings or because Epstein didn’t believe they had the kind of clout that could benefit his power network?
Among the more recognizable names that did crop up on his sporting roster, however, were Casey Wasserman, the president of the Los Angeles Organizing Committee for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and several fellow NFL owners alongside the 84-year-old Kraft, who apparently solicited advice from Epstein while facing a 2019 charge for soliciting prostitution. (He beat the rap.)
Another NFL owner in the lineup was Steve Tisch, the 76-year-old part owner of football’s New York Giants. As a Hollywood producer with credits like Forrest Gump and Risky Business, you might think he could have collected playmates on his own. In 2013, however, Epstein emailed Tisch, “I can invite the (Russian) …to meet if you like.” Tisch quickly replied, “Is she fun?”
A few weeks later, concerning a (name redacted) woman, Tisch asked, “Is my present in NYC?” After Epstein replied, “Yes,” Tisch asked, “Can I get my surprise to take me to lunch tomorrow?”
Epstein then wrote him: “I am happy to have you as a new but …shared interest friend.”
Trump, of course, was the sports figure—he owned a professional football team in the 1980s—whose mentions in the Epstein Files were most eagerly anticipated. His name, in fact, does come up thousands of times, although so far involving nothing of the existentially horrifying nature that his enemies had been waiting for and his allies presumably fearing.
Commander in Cheat
Trump’s standing in the sports world has never seemed particularly high. Even golfers tend to roll their eyes and agree with Rick Reilly, who wrote his book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, about the way the president used to bully and whine his way across the greens.
Trump was spectacularly unsuccessful in his attempts to buy a National Football League team. In the 1980s, he tried to bulldoze his way into the sport as the owner of the New Jersey Generals of the new United States Football League (USFL), which played its games in the spring to avoid competition with the NFL.
Trump was a leader in the USFL’s lawsuit to force a merger with the NFL, which resulted in a pyrrhic victory—his side won the case, but the awarded damages came to $3.76 (and no, that is not a typo!). It sounded like a typical tale of Trump buffoonery.
As for the rest of us, we may just have to keep hitting back until we can write a new song, “Where Have You Gone, Donald Trump?”
Trump declared himself a fan of college football (an attempt to show disdain for the pros who had rejected him) and suffered further rejection from various championship teams who rebuffed his invitations to the White House.
Still, his administration clearly does what it wants when it comes to sports. In selling the war against Iran, for instance, it ran a series of video montages juxtaposing military bomb strikes and hard college and pro football hits. One such hit was a punishing block thrown in 2012 by Nebraska receiver Kenny Bell against a Wisconsin defensive back. Bell, a former NFL player as well, told The Washington Post that he was “disgusted” by the montage. “For that play to be associated with bombing human beings makes me sick,” he said. “I don’t want anything to do with images like that.”
Other athletes decried the usage on moral grounds, but there was no immediate complaint from the NFL itself, which is usually quick to protest any infringement of its copyrighted material. Was that supposed repository of our toughest athletes spooked by Trump? Was he, in fact, the Top Jock after all?
“This White House is vindictive and bullying,” commented Professor Rebecca Tushnet of Harvard Law School. “So, if you’re the NFL, why tempt its wrath?”
Why would they even want to? After all, aren’t they on the same Top Jock team?
As for the rest of us, we may just have to keep hitting back until we can write a new song, “Where Have You Gone, Donald Trump?”
And we will know just where.
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