KFA's electoral college to balloon from 300 voters to more than 10,000

The electoral college that picks the next president of the Korea Football Association (KFA) will grow from 300 people to more than 10,000, the committee overhauling Korean football agreed on Monday.

The K-Football Innovation Committee settled on the figure at its fourth meeting, a closed-door session of about two hours at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in central Seoul.

Park Ji-sung, a former Manchester United and Korea national team midfielder and a co-chair of the committee, presided. Every member attended, including Ryu Seung-min, president of the Korean Sport & Olympic Committee (KSOC) and the committee's other co-chair.

Park set out how the expanded college would be assembled.

“We're discussing how to take the KSOC's reform plan as a base, add people from the professional, semiprofessional, university and promotion-relegation leagues and adjust it to fit the football association's circumstances,” Park said in a briefing after the meeting. “On that basis, we expect the electoral college we recommend to run to more than 10,000.”

That depends on the KSOC rewriting its own rules first.

“We've agreed to finish the process of amending the KSOC regulation on member federations, which is the clause the whole plan rests on, by August,” Park said.

The association is working to a deadline. Chung Mong-gyu resigned as KFA president on July 6 after Korea's group-stage exit from the FIFA World Cup 2026, and the association's bylaws require a successor to be elected within 60 days.

As things stand, the KSOC regulation on member federations caps a presidential electoral college at 300 and makes indirect election the default. In practice, that has meant a small pool of officials from the metropolitan and provincial football associations and the national leagues, plus a handful of coaches, players and referees.

The innovation committee wants a wider base. It argues that representativeness and fairness require the professional, semiprofessional, university and lower-division promotion-relegation tiers to be reflected in the vote.

Where exactly to draw the line has not been decided.

“Including everyone isn't realistic, so we're still discussing how far we can go,” Park said. “Given how far this expands on the current size, the share held by people on the ground, players and coaches is going to rise a lot.”

The mechanics are unsettled as well.

“On the voting method, we're thinking about several options, including electronic voting,” Park said. “There's a budget question too, so we'll need to talk through what makes sense.”

The committee has run into a transparency problem of its own. Minutes from its first three meetings did not attribute remarks to individual speakers, causing some critics to say things are no different from the closed-door administration model the KFA has long been under fire for.

“I'm substituting for that by briefing the media myself as chair,” Park said. “We keep a written record of the gist of the debate on important items, but we don't record which member said what.”

Fuller minutes, he argued, could backfire.

“If a record with the specific remarks in it were made public, it could make the situation worse,” Park said. “I think there's an element of protecting the association in that as well.”

The association's handling of disclosure has drawn scrutiny elsewhere this month. The KFA suspended Shin Tae-yong, the former Korea and Indonesia manager, for one year over his spell in charge of Ulsan HD in 2025, which ended after 65 days amid reports of friction with players and a video that showed him striking a player in the face at a squad introduction. The association declined to confirm the penalty and cited rules on personal information.

The length of the suspension surfaced only when Shin's current club, Persija Jakarta of Indonesia, said in a statement Sunday that it had checked directly with the KFA after reports in Indonesia that he had been banned for 10 years. Shin's suspension runs for just one year and applies only within Korean football's jurisdiction, the club said, and does not affect his work in Indonesia.

BY PIH JU-YOUNG [[email protected]]