[Official] Director Lee Min-sung will lead the Asian Games... The LA Olympics will be a new head coach

*This content was translated by AI.

Coach Lee Min-sung, who finished fourth in the 2026 Asian Football Confederation (AFC) U-23 Asian Cup, will lead the national team until the Aichi and Nagoya Asian Games in September. Instead, the Los Angeles (LA) Olympics, which will be held two years later, will be prepared with a new head coach.

According to the Korea Football Association on the 13th, the association's power reinforcement committee held the first meeting immediately after the AFC U-23 Asian Cup and then held another meeting somewhere in Gyeonggi-do on the 10th. At the meeting on the 10th, all members of the power reinforcement committee, including chairman Hyun Young-min, and all U-23 national team coach Lee Min-sung and coaching staff attended in person to discuss future U-23 national team operating systems along with in-depth reviews of the U-23 Asian Cup, which ended in January. Considering the importance of this issue and the possibility of further discussion in the future, the meeting was held without a separate public procedure.

In June 2024, the association announced a plan to operate the national team by age and set a two-track operation direction to maintain one U-23 coach system as before but manage Olympic-age players while preparing for the Asian Games with U-23. Since his appointment, coach Lee Min-sung has observed the U-20 World Cup on the spot to observe the Olympic pool, running the team around players in the U-23 age group. The U-23 Asian Cup was centered on U-23 players in preparation for the Asian Games, but from March this year, a separate coach team was formed to manage the Olympic age group centered on the full-time leaders of the association, and the two-track operation was scheduled to begin in earnest.

However, AFC will change the U-23 Asian Cup to a four-year cycle that also serves as an Olympic qualification after the 2026 event, and the 2028 LA Olympic qualification schedule is likely to be earlier than expected due to discussions between the IOC and FIFA. As a result, there is a high possibility that the time available for Olympic preparation after the end of the Asian Games will be significantly reduced compared to the existing plan.

After comprehensively reviewing these schedule changes, the Korea Power Reinforcement Committee agreed that there is a limit to preparing for both competitions under the current system. Coach Lee Min-sung also expressed his willingness to focus all his capabilities on winning the Asian Games gold medal, his current top goal, at the meeting, while strongly conveying that it is desirable for the national team to start preparing for the Olympics quickly by a team led by a separate coach.

In the end, the committee decided to push ahead with the appointment of a coach for the Olympic team separately from the Asian Games team in order to operate the preparation system for the Olympics earlier.

Meanwhile, an in-depth review of the overall U-23 Asian Cup was conducted at the meeting on the 10th. The committee clearly pointed out that the national team's performance in this tournament did not meet the fans' expectations. Apart from the minimum result of advancing to the semifinals, they were disappointed in their performance and agreed that a cool evaluation was needed.

Coach Lee Min-sung and the coaching staff explained in detail the overall preparation process for the tournament, the preparation contents of each game, and the analysis and data of individual games, and explained the complementary matters and improvement directions for the Asian Games. He also explained that the process so far has been a process of building and evaluating the player pool toward the goal of winning the Asian Games gold medal, and announced his plan to compress the player pool and increase organizational power based on inspections.

The committee members closely reviewed the revision direction and future plans proposed by director Lee Min-sung and coaching staff for a long time. Through the review, they agreed that this tournament was also meaningful in the process of supplementing the problems by checking the pool of players that have been identified for the Asian Games in actual international competitions amid various variables such as injuries to a number of major players and inability to be dispatched. Putting these opinions together, it was decided that maintaining the continuity of the process so far is more appropriate to achieve the gold medal goal than to prepare for the Asian Games in a new system.

The association will strengthen support for the national team for the 2026 Asian Games gold medal and quickly proceed with the process of appointing a separate national team coach in preparation for the 2028 LA Olympics. In addition, discussions will continue to reorganize the U-23 national team's operating system from the existing two-track operation to a continuous four-year cycle, looking ahead to the 2030 Asian Games and 2032 Olympics.

<© STARNEWS. All rights reserved. No reproduction or redistribution allowed.>

*This content was translated by AI.