With the second round of the World Cup qualification in the books, Korea will resume their search for the new head coach for the men’s national team.

Korea played their final four matches in the second round of the Asian qualification for the 2026 FIFA World Cup under two different caretaker managers: Hwang Sun-hong for two contests in March and Kim Do-hoon for two more this month. They had three wins and one draw in those four matches, capped by a 1-0 victory over China on Tuesday night in Seoul.

Korea qualified for the third round with ease, and the next phase kicks off in September. Over the next couple of months, the Korea Football Association (KFA) will look to fill the coaching vacancy on the men’s squad, a task now long overdue.

The KFA sacked the previous head coach, Jurgen Klinsmann, on Feb. 16, in the aftermath of Korea’s semifinal loss at the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Asian Cup. With little time left before Korea’s next set of games — two World Cup qualifying matches against Thailand on March 21 and 26 — the KFA settled on Hwang Sun-hong, then head coach of the men’s under-23 national team, as the temporary bench boss.

The KFA then began its coaching search in earnest in early April, announcing that it planned to interview 11 candidates. Chung Hae-sung, the top KFA 토토 official in the searching process as head of the National Teams Committee, said the goal was to name the new head coach by early May or the middle of May at the latest.

And by the end of April, the KFA had narrowed down the list of candidates to three — all of them foreign nationals. Though the KFA didn’t publicly disclose those names, it was a poorly-kept secret that Jesse Marsch, former Leeds United head coach, was in the running.