OCTOBER 9 — I got carried away.

Over FIFA’s sanctions imposed on Malaysia for its “Forbidden Seven” — as it stands, the country is unlikely to feature in the 2027 Asia Cup. And probably a few more tournaments after.

In that I joined too enthusiastically those slamming our football leaders, the herd opposed to the other herd, which blindly defends the association which governs the beautiful game in the country.

The league table reads ugly with the chance of getting nasty.

In our delirium, pouring scorn on FAM and the home ministry’s national registration department, we ended up offending our own people, the supporters of Harimau Malaya. Own goals do not win matches.

The one unerring success over the last 20 years is the culture of younger Malaysians owning the national team. Overexcited, lost in a mist of emotions, and loyal — irrational is a given. Forget not fan is a contraction of the word fanatic.  

I am a football fanatic. I identify with the lads in the stand. It’s goosebumps to feel the energy walking into the stadium when a big game is about to kick off. It is a cathedral of passions where devotion is the price of entry.

They are there to win. But above that, they are there when the national team loses.

I do not want to mess with the belief.  

The cliché football is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans is a class trope which holds. Which explains its fans.

But it is precious to us, this football and our relationship with it.

So can we carefully requalify sentiments. While the criticisms are on point, using phrases like betrayal to the homeland, shaming the nation, treasonous, end up upsetting football fans.

What is at stake is something personal to them. They are the most invested in the national football team, and it is not unfair to say they have more skin in the game than those just joining in to virtue signal. Buy a ticket if the national team matters to you, otherwise, tone it down suitably.

There is a subplot, the casual observer overlooks.

Our neighbouring countries serve copious and sustained online vitriol, which fuels our defensiveness. For better or worse, FAM is ours, Ultra Malaya say, and the foreign detractors poke at our deficiencies for fun rather than champion justice.

That said, let’s unpack the judgement from Switzerland.

Zurich does other stuff, too

The protest FIFA ought to have investigated the initial document submission better is disingenuous.

Millions of Malaysians submit millions of documents daily, financial applications to their local schools for student admissions. 

If all agencies, boards, ministries and school administrators are expected to investigate every submission, to a complete degree, it would preclude them from actually delivering their actual mandate. 

Document verification would be the primary job of FIFA rather than organise World Cups, oversee international matches, regulate the 211 members (it has more nations in it than the United Nations), update technical elements in the playing rules, provide technical structures for the training of millions of coaches and billions of players around the world and well, this one is for you FAM — kick out racism from sports.  

Which explains why FIFA receives documentation in good faith.

To enter university, I had to find a government official of a certain grade to verify my document copies by signing off on them with his stamp. I do not think Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia called him. They’d be up to their elbows with call sheets for the five thousand new student enrollees.  

They give the benefit of the doubt to the submitter until his documents are challenged. Then they pursue the information’s veracity. The magnitude of the allegation corresponds to the size of the investigation.

In their notification of the grounds of the Decision, dated October 6, 2025, in Article 66, FIFA refer to Camila Maria do Carmo Nobre de Oliveira and the Equatorial Guinean Football Association as a relevant and similar case.

It foretells. Miss de Oliveira claimed Equatorial Guinea as her birthplace despite her actual birth in Brazil. In the 2010s, Equatorial Guinea was smashing it in women’s football. Continental champion and heading to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, until Mali — which does not rhyme with Vietnam — filed a complaint.

She was found guilty and the national team banned from several tournaments. Instructively, one failed verification led them to check the others. And sure enough, 10 players on their roster were actually Brazilians.

Which is a roundabout way to say, FIFA regardless of FAM’s legal response for the seven players, the federation is set to revisit previous naturalisations.

Naturalised players are a global norm. Malaysia can give anyone in the world citizenship and they can play for Malaysia, any of Zinedine Zidane’s kids or youth players in the English Premier League. 

However, new citizens have to wait years to play due to residency requirements, unless they have a grandparent in the closet. They may have been born in the closet, no problem, as long as the closet was in what is Malaysia today. Or a Malaysian hospital.

To underline the point, Wimbledon bad-boy turned actor Vinny Jones, all English, played for Wales late in his career because his mom’s mom was Welsh, in the mid-1990s.

For new citizens, residency dictates, unless direct family links free them from residency requirements.

The grandparent was from here contention is geared to quicken their appearances for the country.

The compound to protect Malaysia

While FIFA’s focus is limited, for Malaysians citizenship is all political. Article 19 which covers citizenship in the Federal Constitution is a battlefront. Recently, the minister assured that player naturalisation follows Article 19.

We live in the real world. If the Unity Government holds a referendum today, giving citizenship to world class players who can get us an Olympic gold or qualify to the World Cup Finals, it’ll get two-third of the votes. Article 19 they can ignore.

Perhaps the whole Article 19 needs a revisit, Malaysians have changed.

To be flexible in this new era is fine if it is consistent and objective.

So, let’s not kid ourselves that any of the seven have lived in Malaysia for the last 10 of the 12 years, which is a requirement. They probably did not know whether Malaysia is a country or type of tropical disease 10 years ago as teenagers or pre-pubescent kids trashing a ball in a Sao Paulo or Bilbao alley.

I have a recent experience which tells how the usual local process for stay in Malaysia is quite different from the fast-track citizenship the “Forbidden Seven” dealt with.

This year I assisted my friend’s wife of 19 years with her immigration application. She needed an external guarantor because her husband, after his second stroke, is immobile and unemployed. 

For this, I needed to furnish my EPF number, bank-validated statements for three latest months, identity card and other forms. Which was insufficient, so they needed my small business information along with bank-validated statements for three latest months for the business. It was a marathon for the guarantor.

The applicant — with her own documents prepared — her husband in his wheelchair and me had to be there outside the home ministry compound before the gates opened at quarter past seven in the morning for the designated appointment day. 

Malaysians do not need to read Kafka to know surrealism as many cars queue at the closed gates before 6.30 in the morning, to join the human queue inside the buildings, to get the queue numbers to wait in the waiting lobby. 

Those without cars or Grab fare, get in a bit later and form lengthier queues, through the morning hours.

A series of waiting, not for the meek.

She was a senior executive with a regional role for a Fortune 500 company, and has two Malaysian teenage sons.

And here’s the kicker. She is only applying for a long-term social visit pass. Not citizenship, not permanent residency, just the right to be in the country to care for her Malaysian husband and children.

That’s how inconvenient and testing it is.  

Imagine the tens of thousands of Malaysian-born stateless children who can give the National Registration Department a walk through of their Malaysian years which exceed 15 years without the money to do a London Christmas or Bangkok shopping because other than not having a MyKad which leads to a passport, they can never make enough cleaning dishes in the restaurant or collect parking rate — the cash jobs they can do without formal education.

So many, fighting to not actually be Malaysian but to stay on in Malaysia without being deported from the only home they know because they have no MyKad. 

And the same National Registration Department without the actual birth certificates of the seven players’ alleged local grandparents hands out citizenship to their grandchildren. 

They bypass the long-term social visit pass, work visa or permanent residency stage, and go straight to citizenship without even having to queue outside their own toilets in Castile or Buenos Aires.

How is it fair in any universe? Let’s not talk about the football. Let’s talk about the humans mistreated here. Let’s talk about how football matches are abandoned by FIFA dictate if players are abused by fans, but here in Malaysia conversations about being fairer to the most oppressed in our society are taboo.

Football is love

What football teaches us that maybe years in the classroom might not is that to judge people by their actions and not by their skin colour or personal predicament.

Malaysia wanting to succeed on a playing field and its adoring fans willing it is an emotional act which gives meaning to the players and fans, regardless of the result. Really, in many ways, the next goal does win.

Malaysians barracking neighbouring countries and them dishing it back to us is fair-play. That Singaporeans are not funny is not our fault. That second-tier nations in their pursuit of glory seek to inject their team with better talent is far easier to understand than our national subsidy system.

That those fans expect their leaders, in FAM and its patrons, and the sports ministry, retain a degree of competitiveness without resorting to cheating is not unreasonable. They will back the country without question but the leaders may want to reciprocate that loyalty with character and a level of honesty. Trust when frayed eventually snaps.

Most cannot comprehend the 19-page legal document from legal.fifa.com but they believe in the administrators and patron because they are convinced they too love the game like them. 

That the trained and experienced use the training and experience not to sell Malaysian football down the river.

If at the end of this tunnel, the fans find out those they trusted, in fact manipulated their loyalty and commitment to the team, the longer-term damage may devastate Malaysian football far more than the loss of quality players. 

What is a national team if its soul, its supporters, lose heart? 

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.