No More Metsu

The Korea Football Association (KFA) is having difficulty with its quest to find a replacement for the head coach position of the national football team.

The organization’s technical committee has made it clear that the replacement will be kept confidential, but recently with a final list of coaching candidates released by the press, the committee was embarrassed.

The technical committee called this incident ridiculous, strongly denying the releasing of the list. Kang Shin-woo, vice chairman of the KFA`s technical committee, said on September 6 that the information that a few press personnel reported was incorrect, and that those are only based on assumptions. “Only the chairman has access to the assessment results in order to avoid any leaks,” said Kang.

An official from the organization pointed out the overheated competition among the press to get the coverage, saying that it could only make another Bruno Metsu.

Last year, when the organization was trying to find a replacement for Humberto Coelho, the press was racing neck-and-neck to get the story of the new coach first and even directly made several calls to Frenchman Bruno Metsu, which would eventually lead to the failure of recruiting Metsu because the money he asked for became too much for the association to afford. In the end, the organization chose Jo Bonfrere, which turned out to be another failure since there was no thorough analysis conducted.

“A systematic measure to strengthen the authority of the technical committee is highly necessary for a brighter future of Korean football. The current system is not quite credible with the assessment of coaching candidates,” said a technical committee member.

In other words, the current committee has no adequate authority to work properly and manpower is far from sufficient, which makes a systematic and reasonable analysis hard to achieve.

Jong-Koo Yang yjongk@donga.com