The Korean Football Association has rejected Jeonbuk Hyundai’s request for a forfeit. The rationale is clear.
The league announced in a press release on July 7 that it had decided not to accept Jeonbuk’s request for a match result correction.
Jeonbuk requested a forfeit of Pohang’s 0-3 loss to the Pohang Steelers in the K League 1 Round 35 match at Jeonju World Cup Stadium on March 28.
Pohang brought on Shin Kwang-hoon in the 23rd minute of the first half after side-back Kim Yong-hwan suffered a painful ankle injury and could no longer play. However, the substitution board raised by the referee showed striker Kim In-sung’s number 7 instead of Kim Yong-hwan’s number 3. Since Kim Yong-hwan had already headed to the bench, Shin Kwang-hoon naturally entered the game. 아톰카지노 도메인
Pohang made the mistake of writing down the wrong substitute, and the referees didn’t realize it. Only after the Jeonbuk bench protested to the referees did Pohang replace Kim Yong-hwan and Kim Seung-dae, who returned to the bench in the 32nd minute of the first half. Kim Yong-hwan was off the pitch due to injury, but according to the scoreboard, Pohang played with 12 players for about six minutes.
Jeonbuk took issue with this, arguing that Kim In-sung should be considered an ineligible player and demanded a forfeit.
However, the KFA explained the reason for the dismissal, saying, “It is recognized that Kim In-sung and Shin Kwang-hoon participated in the match at the same time, but the cause of the incident occurred in an area that is solely the responsibility of the referee, not the club, so it cannot be considered that the two players are ineligible.”
The logic behind the federation’s dismissal of the forfeit can be seen in two main ways.
The first is that the fault lies with the referees rather than Pohang. There is nothing wrong with Pohang writing down Kim In-sung as a substitute on the substitution sheet. If the referee had properly sent Kim out, this would not have been an issue. It’s a matter of Pohang paying for their mistake and wasting a replacement card.
The federation also said, “Until Pohang wrote down the substitution card and submitted it to the standby referee, there was no violation of the rules of the game, nor was there any cause that could lead to a violation of the rules. The fact that the Pohang coaching staff originally intended Kim Yong-hwan but mistakenly wrote down Kim In-sung was a matter of decision and not a violation of the rules,” the federation said.
Although Pohang may have contributed to the violation, the referees were the ones who violated the rules.
The federation also referred to various cases at home and abroad.
Some claimed that the case was similar to the Gwangju FC forfeit in 2021, but the federation explained that it was a different incident. In that case, Gwangju requested a fourth substitute on their own, which the referee accepted, so the federation concluded that the club was clearly at fault. It was not only the referees who violated the rules, but also Gwangju.
The difference is that Pohang would not have had any problems if the referees had run the game properly. In the first place, the case is not directly comparable.
There have been similar cases in Korea and abroad, and none of them resulted in a forfeit. In 2000, a match between Jeonbuk and Bucheon was temporarily played with 12 players due to the absence of Park Sung-jae, who was supposed to be substituted, but even then the two players were not ruled ineligible.
Last year, in a match between Freiburg and Bayern Munich in 2022, Bayern Munich temporarily went to 12 men when Kingsley Coman, who was supposed to be on the bench, was on the pitch, but the German Football Association rejected Freiburg’s appeal. In June of this year, the same conclusion was reached in the South American Football Confederation Copa Sudamericana Group E match between Santos (Brazil) and Blooming (Bolivia). The same happened in a 2021 Japanese J2 League match between Tochigi and Omiya.
The federation believed that the multiple cases were unreasonable to grant Jeonbuk’s request.
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