This story is part of Billboard’s Global World Cup Series, a collection of 11 cover stories which pairs top soccer stars across the world competing in the 2026 FIFA World Cup with highly-touted musicians in accompanying countries.
This summer, the World Cup arrives bigger than it has ever been: 48 teams, three host nations, the first edition played across the United States, Canada and Mexico together. South Korea travels to it for the 11th time in a row — a streak that runs unbroken to 1986 and still carries the memory of 2002, when the team reached the semifinals as co-hosts. For a few weeks every four years, an entire nation keeps the same schedule, wears the same color and shouts the same three words at the same instant: “Oh Pilseung Korea.”
A World Cup is a scored event — walkout anthems, stadium singalongs, the chant that turns tens of thousands of strangers into a single voice. Football and pop have been two of Korea’s loudest exports of the century, each carrying the country’s name abroad. And underneath the noise, the two run on the same engine: long, invisible preparation spent on one public moment, judged the second it arrives.
For its FIFA World Cup Edition, Billboard Korea puts two performers in one frame who rarely share it: singer Kwon Eunbi and footballer Heo Yong Joon. The surface logic is obvious — a stage, a pitch, two people who work in front of crowds. The more telling logic is timing: both arrive on the front edge of a new chapter.
