Hungary 9-0 South Korea: Forty Hours of Flying, Ninety Minutes of Nightmare

# Hungary 9-0 South Korea: Twenty-Four Hours of Travel, Ninety Minutes of Nightmare

June 17, 1954. Zurich, Switzerland. World Cup group stage. Hungary vs. South Korea. If you have no concept of this match's scoreline—9-0—let's first understand how South Korea got there.

In 1954, South Korea qualified for the World Cup for the first time in history. Note: "qualified"—not "flew in." The South Korean team had to travel from Seoul to Switzerland, and in an era without jet airliners, that journey required multiple transfers, days of waiting, and all kinds of travel hardships you can't imagine today. It's said the South Korean players spent over forty hours traveling before reaching Zurich—forty hours, amid the roar of propeller planes, crossing the Asian continent, landing in a country most of them had never seen. When they got off the plane, their legs were still swollen. Then, less than forty-eight hours later, they stood on a World Cup pitch, facing the Mighty Magyars—that golden generation of Hungary that hadn't lost a single match in the previous four years.

Puskás, Kocsis, Hidegkuti—these names probably felt less real to the South Korean players than any European fairy tale they'd ever heard. The strongest opponents they faced in their domestic league were other South Korean clubs. They had never seen anyone like Puskás, who could curl a ball into the top corner from thirty yards with his left foot. Once the match started, Hungary gave South Korea no time to adjust. In the 12th minute, Puskás scored. Then he scored again. Kocsis scored—not with pretty goals, but by getting the ball into the net with any body part possible. Hidegkuti—the man who invented the "deep-lying forward" role—roamed back and forth in the penalty area, and South Korea's defenders never knew whether to follow him or hold their positions.

9-0. South Korea's goalkeeper, Hong Duk-young, picked the ball out of the net nine times. It's said that after the match, he sat in the locker room for a long time, not taking off his jersey, not taking off his gloves, just sitting. A teammate came over and patted him on the shoulder. He looked up and said one thing—not in Korean, but in a bit of English he'd learned on the plane—"We tried."

That match was the worst defeat in South Korea's World Cup history. But it was also a starting point—from then on, South Korea improved with every World Cup. In 2002, they reached the semifinals on home soil. In 2018, they eliminated Germany in the group stage. The earliest chapter of Asian football's greatest comeback story was that 0-9 in 1954.