The South Korea national under-20 football team (Korean: 대한민국 20세 이하 축구 국가대표팀; recognized as Korea Republic by FIFA) represents South Korea in international youth football competitions. It is also managed as under-18 or under-19 team.
Main article: History of the South Korea national football team
Red Fury (1983)[]
Having finished the qualifying tournament as third place, South Korea under-19 could not originally play the final stage in the 1982 AFC Youth Championship. However, the North Korean FA was punished with a two-year suspension for assaulting a referee at the 1982 Asian Games by the Asian Football Confederation, so South Korea fortunately advanced to the final stage instead of North Korea, the runners-up.[1] Then they qualified for the 1983 FIFA World Youth Championship, after winning the championship. The manager Park Jong-hwan trained his team with tactics which demanded a lot of stamina and extreme teamwork for World Youth Championship.[2]
Drawn in a group with Scotland, Australia and the host Mexico, South Korea lost their first game against Scotland, but they advanced to the knockout stage by defeating the other two teams. In the quarter-finals, they faced Uruguay, and won the game 2–1 with a forward Shin Yon-ho's two goals after extra time. The news that they reached the semi-finals for the first time in a FIFA competition became a myth in South Korea,[3] a weak country in sports at that time, although it was a youth competition. The foreign press were also interested in South Korean team's achievement, describing it as the "Red Fury".[4][5] South Korea finished the tournament in fourth place after losing to Brazil and Poland,[6] and a South Korean defender Kim Pan-keun was named in official All-Star Team.[7]
The Inter-Korean Sports Conferences were held on the recommendation of the International Olympic Committee since 1963, but the conferences always broke down until the 1980s because both sides had not seen eye to eye. In February 1991, however, they decided to make Korean unified teams in table tennis and football.[8] In that same year, both South and North qualified for the FIFA World Youth Championship as winners and runners-up of the 1990 AFC Youth Championship, so they urgently made allied under-20 football team for the world championship despite concerns about communication and teamwork.[9] Their challenge was ended in the quarter-finals.
South Korea 2–0 Thailand 
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