Malaysia to Kick Out All Foreign Footballers

By: Daryl | August 4th, 2008

While we debate the legal and ethical implications of 6+5, Malaysian football has gone ahead and implemented 11+0.

That means all foreigners will be booted out of the Malaysian league next season.

“We are not at the status of English Premier League, our league is not matured yet, therefore some drastic measures must be taken to improve it,” the federation’s deputy president, Khairy Jamaluddin, told local reporters.

“With the presence of foreign players, local players have not been given the opportunity (to develop).”

Pretty drastic measures, but the league is apparently full of foreigners taking relatively big paychecks, but not necessarily the sort of big name foreigners that raise the standard or the league.

And while that’s not good for the league, it’s even worse for Malaysia’s national team. Just ask Fabio Capello.

But now Malaysian football has taken this bold step, it will be fascinating to see what happens next. In the short term there’ll be a mad mad scramble to convert all the teams into domestic only outfits in time for next season.

But it’s the long term that’s really interesting. There are always arguments about too many foreigners in the English Premier League and counter-arguments that foreign players raise the overall standard. All arguments about what could and should be done about limiting foreign players in major European leagues have so far been purely theoretical, but Malaysia are actually going to go ahead and do it. If the Malaysian football team shows a marked improvement in the next few years, then you can expect certain European football associations to take notice.

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lem

I'm a Malaysian who's old enough to remember when the Football Association of Malaysia first imposed a cap on the number of foreign players (long before the first ban in 1999) and it did nothing to improve domestic football, largely due to 1) a culture of corruption and cronyism in the Malaysian league, exacerbated by political appointments, and 2) inadequate infrastructure for grassroots football, despite the money pumped into FAM. And that's just the culture within the associations and clubs, without going into the larger context of how football fits into the warp and weft of Malaysian society. A lot of fans were driven away by match-fixing scandals and the decline in the quality of football, and a sense of distrust over whether players and officials are chosen based purely on merit. Aggressive marketing of the Premier League has helped to kill off mass support for domestic football, but that's not the sole reason nor even the main one.

There's more to this situation than meets the eye -- there's political jockeying going on, and yes, more than a smidgen of xenophobia. I am disappointed but not surprised that the AFC has not called out Khairy Jamaluddin over his own unsuitability for the position he holds in FAM: he's an MP, the son-in-law of the current Malaysian prime minister, and the deputy youth chief of a major party in the current ruling coalition. How does this not constitute political interference in football?
diana

As far as I am aware of, it used to be that Malaysia's FIFA rankings was better than the 166th ranking as being reported by Reuters, Daryl. The older generation of Singaporeans here in my country still remembered the time when in the 60s and especially the 70s, that was the high point in the football rivalry between Singapore and Malaysia.

A mention on the Malaysian Cup here, it will bring back a lot of memories (the newspapers do at times write about the good old days when Singapore was once part of it, and that was where the rivalry really began against our neighbour up north). I was from the generation not being exposed to the whole thing (because we already have our own professional league since the 90s) and so the newspapers and my father's personal memories made up for it.

The rivalry between Malaysia and here in Singapore is something like England and Scotland (the whole 'Auld Enemy' thing) and as we saw during Euro 2008, a revival of the Austria-Germany rivalry. Though in this case between Singapore and Malaysia, it's the case of the small brother winning over the big brother in recent times. Not that I am bragging but it's a fact.

The rivalry (like the Austria-Germany one at Euro 2008) was revived during a regional football tournament last year. In this tournament - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...

The Malaysia Cup I was talking about earlier - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

'If teh Malaysian football team shows a marked improvement in the next few years, then you can expect certain European football associations to take notice.'
Who knows. This will be something interesting to follow in the long term.
Cerberus

Yeah, and I'll give up humorous body organs if it turns out xenophobia had nothing to do with this decision.

I don't see how this is going to be a good thing. It's always helpful to have some foreigners to help your talented players learn a new way or style to use if their old styles get sussed out. It's also been thoroughly proven to be quite beneficial to African national teams who have been able to send their more talented players off to teams that can afford to give them top quality education and training, which helps their national teams do better. It also helps flow some money back to those African nations to reinvest in infrastructure of their own.

England's national team isn't being destroyed by dirty foreigners. The reason they failed was a bad coach, a lack of talented individuals due to inadequate youth training academies, too many egos, an inability to think outside the tactics box when necessary (something quite probably traceable to the fact that the English players refuse to play outside England and thus learn new ways of doing things or to learn from their foreign teammates), and expectations of quality from a very loud and whiny press and populace who don't seem to realize that they haven't invested enough into the infrastructure to produce top-notch talent on a world-class level. Oh, that and the fact that they were up against Russia and Croatia, who turned out to actually be pretty good, so sloppy play was not going to help them beat teams with that much momentum.

Sepp Blatter's idea is idiotic in many respects, but will be attractive to countries like Malaysia and England to indulge the racism that underlies xenophobia and hurt their country and other countries in the process.