For North Korea's "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il, though, there may be more at stake than national pride.
The economy is supine, a food shortage is worsening and new U.N. sanctions loom after the sinking in March of a South Korean naval vessel.
The matches are at the very least a distraction for the North's impoverished masses, and at best will serve up a propaganda windfall to Kim, who succeeded his father and is grooming his third son, Kim Jong-un, to take over.
"It is probably unthinkable that North Korea may not use this opportunity, may not televise the games, when they know that this is really a good opportunity to mobilise nationalist feelings among North Koreans when they are experiencing all kinds of difficulties," said Paik Hak-soon, director at the Center for North Korean studies at Sejong Institute.
The North Korean leadership has triggered skirmishes with the South, conducted missile tests, and provoked other "incidents" to ratchet up tensions on the Korean Peninsula and keep the country's 23 million people focused on the possibility of war, rather than hunger pangs or the lack of paychecks or electricity.
Football has helped strengthen a word-of-mouth network that eats into the state's information cordon.
This network has also spread word about succession plans in Asia's only communist dynasty and other matters the North's leaders want to keep secret from its people.
"I remember asking a guy who seemed well into it in the bar if he knew what the result would be, and he was like 'yeah, it was in the newspaper the next day'. He just hadn't seen the game," said Cockerell, who has made 90 trips to North Korea.
"In Pyongyang everybody can tell you the big football names in the world."
