North Koreans might have looked forward to hours of live football next summer after their national team qualified for the World Cup for the first time since 1966. There is, however, a problem with live sports coverage in Kim Jong Il’s North Korea: there isn’t any.

Televised international football games, like much else in the Stalinist regime, are a carefully wielded instrument of control: victories are fêted as proof of the Dear Leader’s inspirational powers; defeats are ignored.

The nation’s most widely read newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, has no shortage of advice from the Workers’ Party, but no sports page. Radio was declared “an enemy of the nation” in 2004, and North Korea’s one weekday television channel simply does not do disappointment — so for a country with very few triumphs on the world sports stage, the broadcasting schedule is often a little quiet.

It remains unclear, for example, whether the general public even knows of its team’s landmark result on Wednesday night, when it secured a draw with Saudi Arabia. Tightly edited highlights might be shown by the end of this week — with images of the crowd and any billboard adverts around the pitch blacked out.

Times Archive, 1966: North Korea's startling victory

We came expecting the inevitable. We left having witnessed the impossible

• Topic: World Cup 1966

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It was much the same during last year’s Olympics: good coverage if you were interested in women’s weightlifting and judo; bleak on all other fronts.

The propaganda value to the regime of World Cup qualification though, will be immense and comes at a magnificently opportune moment. The regime declared a “150-day battle” last month to improve the nation’s fortunes. The idea that the Dear Leader has managed, by quiet inspiration, to command immediate success for the nation’s football squad will not, say observers, pass uncelebrated.

And yet qualification presents the regime with a problem. Even the most gullible North Korean fan must realise that a World Cup would have a fixed timetable of games. Should the North Korean squad suffer three consecutive drubbings and get sent home early, Kim Jong Il will have to decide whether to pretend that the team won — or that the whole event simply never happened.

There are thought to be 55 television sets for every 1,000 people in North Korea — enough viewers to start wondering, surely, what became of their glory boys.