当马来西亚球员不是马来西亚人时 When is a Malaysian footballer not a Malaysian footballer?

JOÃO FIGUEIREDO became a Malaysian citizen on June 3rd. A week later, he was a hero. Playing for the national football team, he opened the scoring against Vietnam, setting up a 4–0 drubbing of a regional rival. It was one of the great nights in Malaysian football. It has also become one of its most controversial.

The Malaysian victory that night was not particularly Malaysian. The team featured no fewer than five players who had become naturalised Malaysian citizens only a week before the match (and two more earlier in the year). None had been born in Malaysia, but all were deemed Malaysian by ancestry. According to the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM), at least one of each player’s grandparents had been born in Malaysia, giving their citizenship a legal basis.

FIFA—football’s global governing body—disagrees. After receiving an anonymous complaint following the match, it found Malaysia guilty of forging players’ documents. It was, “pure and simple, a form of cheating”, FIFA said. The FAM was fined and FIFA has referred the case to local criminal authorities. The players have been suspended for a year.

On November 17th FIFA released a report revealing the scale of the alleged shenanigans. It claimed that Mr Figueiredo’s grandmother was not born in the Malaysian state of Johor, as FAM had asserted, but in the Brazilian one of Minas Gerais. For similar reasons the Malaysian heritage of all seven players were all deemed spurious. The players, it was also revealed, knew little about the papers they were signing—largely because they were written in Malay, a language they did not understand. (Four players had never played for a Malaysian club before making their international debut; three had only signed for one in 2025).

Malaysia has denied intentional wrongdoing. After the allegations first emerged, the home-affairs minister said the players were granted citizenship after a “rigorous process”. The association has said it will appeal FIFA’s ruling to the international Court of Arbitration for Sport, though it has acknowledged that there may have been a “technical error”. The prime minister has sought to distance himself from the episode; his government’s sports ministry has frozen new funding for FAM.

All this has done little to calm furious Malaysians, who are demanding punishment for officials in FAM and the home ministry. The country is on the verge of qualifying for the Asian Cup, a tournament it has rarely played in. But a potential points penalty for the alleged fraud could jeopardise that. “The country doesn’t hold much hope in the football association’s ability to run the game, but even by those standards this scandal is really sickening,” says Aysha Ridzuan, a local commentator.

And for some Malaysians, the episode is yet another example of the opacity of the country’s citizenship process. Activists have seized on the footballers’ expedited citizenship (five were issued passports the day they applied) to highlight a double standard. Around 120,000 stateless people live in Malaysia—many of them born and raised there. For them, the path to becoming Malaysian remains a long shot.