South Korea Women

No fixture defines the Taegeuk Ladies quite like the one against Japan. Every meeting with the Nadeshiko carries the weight of a significant continental rivalry, and it was Japan who handed South Korea their introduction to international football in the harshest possible terms, a 1–13 defeat on 6 September 1990, days after the squad had been put together for that year's Asian Games.

Since then the gap has narrowed without ever quite closing. The clearest sign of it came at the 2022 AFC Women's Asian Cup, where South Korea reached the final and lost 3–2 to China rather than Japan, a result that still stands as the team's best showing in the tournament, well ahead of the bronze they had taken in 2003. Two years earlier there had already been proof that the ceiling had risen: at the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup they beat Spain 2–1 and went through to the Round of 16, the furthest South Korea have gone at a World Cup.

Ji So-yun carried much of that era. Seventy-five goals and 177 caps make her the side's leading scorer, built up over a career that also took her to Chelsea, and her presence on the ball gave South Korea a way to raise the tempo when a game needed it.

Continental titles have been harder to come by than continental near-misses. The EAFF E-1 Football Championship is the one they have actually won, in 2005 and again in 2025, with runner-up finishes either side of that gap in 2015 and 2019. At the Olympics, where they have appeared six times since 1996, the group stage has always been as far as it goes. None of it changes what still opens the conversation about this team: a first match away to Japan, lost by twelve goals, that gave the rivalry its starting point before the team had won anything at all.