*This content was translated by AI.
Hong Myung-bo Team, which is preparing for an A-match warm-up match in March in preparation for the 2026 FIFA 2026 FIFA North and Central America World Cup, will conduct a "final inspection" to form the national team's roster.
According to the Korea Football Association, the coaches of the Korean national soccer team will visit the K-League sites in various parts of the country on the 14th and 15th to check the performance of the players themselves. This is the last check before the press conference to announce the national team's roster at 2 p.m. on the 16th at Korea Football Park Stadium in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province.
Coach Hong Myung-bo, who visited several K-League stadiums earlier, is not expected to visit a specific stadium himself as he is on the verge of announcing the list. Instead, it is known that Hong will watch all the games on TV as a whole and make a final decision on the national team list by combining opinions from the coaches who visited the site on that day.
The national team's roster is in fact the last warm-up match list ahead of the 2026 FIFA North and Central America World Cup in June, which is inevitably meaningful. Hong Myung-bo Team will face Ivory Coast, ranked 37th in FIFA, at 11 p.m. on the 28th (Korea Standard Time) at Milton Kins Stadium, England, and play Austria at 3:45 a.m. on the 1st of next month at Ernst Havel Stadion in Vienna, Austria.
After these two warm-up matches, the final entry for the World Cup will be announced, and after one or two more warm-up matches, he will immediately play on the World Cup stage. It was common to play a final warm-up match in the country toward the "final site" after a warm-up match that also served as a World Cup opening ceremony in Korea, but this tournament is so fast that it is possible to skip the domestic warm-up match and leave for Mexico immediately to play only the final warm-up match there.
In the end, the list is expected to reveal the outline of the final entry for the World Cup to some extent. Coach Hong Myung-bo is also likely to focus more on the final quenching by forming a national team list centered on the players who have been the main players of the national team.
However, it is not that there is no possibility of a "surprise selection." As it is still early in the season, there are no players who show such a presence that the possibility of joining the national team has emerged, but there may be many players who will be on the "last test" before the World Cup, especially those who were included in the national team's candidate group.
In particular, defensive midfielders, who have suffered a major gap due to successive injuries to Park Yong-woo (Al-Ain) and Won Doo-jae (Corpacan), are not many players playing in overseas leagues, so there is a possibility that midfield resources who showed competitiveness in the K-League last season or are in good condition this year will make a surprise embarkation on the national team list.
After the announcement of the national team's roster on the 16th, Hong Myung-bo Team will leave the UK directly through Incheon International Airport on the 23rd without training in Korea. All overseas players will be joined locally. The match against Ivory Coast is expected to be a warm-up match against South Africa and Austria in the same group at the World Cup in preparation for the winner of the UEFA Playoff Pass D (Denmark, Czech Republic, Ireland, and North Macedonia).
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*This content was translated by AI.
