There are World Cup runs that get romanticised over time. South Korea's 2002 campaign has gone the opposite direction — the longer the distance, the more contested it becomes. That tension is precisely what makes it worth revisiting.
Co-hosted by South Korea and Japan, the tournament produced one of the most improbable knockout runs in the competition's history. The host nation eliminated Italy in the round of sixteen, Spain in the quarter-finals, and reached the semi-finals — further than any Asian side had ever gone. The story should have been straightforwardly extraordinary.
It wasn't.
The Goals That Weren't, and the Ones That Were
The Italy match turned on a disallowed goal late in extra time — Francesco Totti sent off in contentious circumstances, Ahn Jung-hwan's golden goal winner scored against the club that employed him. The Spain quarter-final produced two disallowed goals that television replays showed were, at minimum, debatable. The referee appointments became the story. The tournament's governing body faced questions it never fully answered.
What complicates the revisionism, though, is the football itself. South Korea were not a passive beneficiary of disputed calls. Guus Hiddink built a side that pressed with genuine intensity, defended with organisation, and carried real threat on the counter. The atmosphere inside Korean stadiums — the noise, the red-clad crowds — was a legitimate force. Dismissing the run entirely requires ignoring the football, which is its own kind of dishonesty.
The semi-final loss to Germany grounded the narrative somewhat. A genuine defeat, no controversy attached. It confirmed that this was a real team, not a manufactured one — which paradoxically made the earlier results harder to categorise cleanly.
Why It Still Matters
2002 sits in football's memory as a stress test for the sport's credibility — and the sport half-passed it. It produced a genuinely transformative moment for Asian football while simultaneously exposing how poorly equipped the game was to handle scrutiny of officiating at the highest level.
VAR exists, in part, because of matches like those. That's not a small legacy.
Whether South Korea deserved their semi-final place depends on how much weight you give to what happened on the pitch versus what was taken off it. Most people have already decided. Most people are still arguing.