The Korean Professional Football Association has suspended Choi Tae-wook, a former national soccer team coach and current member of the K League’s Technical Study Group (TSG), from his duties after he was indicted on charges of conspiring with an agent to accept money to get a former student-athlete into a K League club.
An official from the professional league told The Korea Herald on Thursday, “There is a regulation to give disciplinary action to federation employees (when they cause social harm). However, since Choi is under a delegation contract, there is a dilemma in deciding whether to discipline him or not,” he said, adding, “We have handed him over to the Korean Football Association (KFA).”
The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office’s Criminal Division 9 (Deputy Chief Prosecutor Kim Hyun-ah), which has focused on investigating irregularities in professional soccer recruitment, issued a press release the previous day saying that it had indicted 11 people, including Lee Jong-gul, former head coach of the K League 2 Ansan Greeners, Lim Jong-heon, and agent Choi Mo, for bribery and embezzlement, among other charges, for allegedly exchanging money in exchange for recruitment to professional teams. However, the inclusion of Choi in the indictment came as a shock.
According to the prosecution, Choi is charged with bribery for colluding with his agent, Choi Mo, to hand over money to Lee and Lim in exchange for the player’s signing with Ansan. The prosecution said Choi was a past benefactor of the player.
The prosecution emphasized that it would “take measures to disgorge the profits from the defendants’ crimes, notify the KFA of the misconduct, and ensure that punishment commensurate with the crime is meted out to the defendants who treat player management as a practice.
The KFA will use the indictment to convene a tribunal. It will then decide on disciplinary action after seeing the outcome of the trial. An official from the professional federation said, “We have given our review to the federation’s punishment committee first. We understand that he will communicate directly with the KFA.” “Prior to the trial, Choi is immediately excluded from work. We will request a statement of reasons. I think we need to confirm exactly what happened in this case through documents.”온라인바카라
Choi, a member of the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup quarterfinal team, was considered one of the leaders of the future of South Korean soccer after serving as the coach of “Bentoho,” which reached the round of 16 at last year’s World Cup in Qatar. Until recently, he maintained his on-field skills as a member of the K-League TSG, but he faced the biggest crisis of his career when he was implicated in an unsavory professional soccer recruitment scandal.
Of course, we’ll have to wait and see the outcome of the trial. However, the fact that a former national team player and “young blood leader” who was only born in 1981 has been caught up in a recruitment scandal is enough to send shockwaves through the Korean soccer world.