Hongrie 9-0 Corée du Sud : Quarante Heures de Vol, Quatre-Vingt-Dix Minutes de Cauchemar

# Hungary 9-0 South Korea: 24 Hours of Travel, 90 Minutes of Nightmare

June 17, 1954. Zurich, Switzerland. World Cup group stage. Hungary vs. South Korea. If you have no idea what that scoreline means — 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 the word "qualified" — not "flew." The South Korean team had to travel from Seoul to Switzerland, and in an era before jet airliners, that journey involved multiple transfers, days of waiting, and all kinds of travel hardships you can't imagine today. It's said that 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 before. 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 must have felt less real to the South Korean players than any European fairy tale they'd ever heard. The toughest 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 part of his body he could use. Hidegkuti — the man who invented the "deep-lying forward" role — drifted through the penalty area, and the South Korean 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, without taking off his jersey or his gloves, just sitting there. 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 knocked Germany out in the group stage. The earliest chapter of Asian football's greatest comeback story was that 0-9 in 1954.