PETALING JAYA: The most alarming finding in the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) audit is the length of time a basic accountability mechanism appears to have been absent — and the fact that nothing appears to have stopped it.
That raises a simple but uncomfortable question: how did the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) operate for nearly a decade without congress approving its annual budget?
Every organisation has a point that reveals how it truly functions.
For Malaysian football, that moment may not just be the seven-player eligibility scandal. It may not even be the wider AFC audit findings on structure and control.
It may instead be one line buried in a 75-minute presentation at FAM’s extraordinary congress: budgets were not tabled before congress since at least 2016.
That detail changes the nature of the discussion.
Because a budget is not routine paperwork. It is the mechanism through which congress authorises spending and sets direction.
Without it, oversight weakens immediately. Delegates cannot properly question priorities, challenge allocations, or approve how funds are used.
According to the AFC audit, that mechanism appears to have been absent for almost a decade.
That is not a simple lapse. It is a structural failure of oversight.
Negligence or pattern?
Former FAM president Hamidin Amin has reportedly described the issue as negligence.
That explanation might hold if the lapse occurred once, or even intermittently.
But a 10-year gap pushes the argument beyond oversight.
At that point, negligence becomes difficult to sustain as an explanation on its own. It begins to resemble a pattern of acceptance.
A failure of this duration does not occur because one individual forgets a requirement.
It occurs when multiple actors operate within a framework where the requirement is no longer enforced in practice.
That should concern affiliates, sponsors, and public stakeholders who assume congress functions as a financial check on the organisation.
Why congress matters
This is the core issue. The question is not about accounting practice but about institutional control.
Congress exists to scrutinise leadership decisions, particularly financial ones.
Without a tabled budget, that function is effectively weakened.
The comparison becomes unavoidable:
- A listed company without shareholder budget approval.
- A parliament without financial debate.
- A board that is told to approve spending after the fact.
In each case, oversight collapses.
Yet the AFC findings suggest football governance in Malaysia may have drifted into precisely this condition.
A wider pattern emerges
The budget issue does not stand alone.
The AFC audit also highlights concentrated authority, weak internal checks, unclear reporting lines, and a culture where escalation appears limited.
Taken together, these findings point to something more systemic than a single breach.
The missing budgets are not the core problem.
They are an indicator.
A sign of a structure where formal processes existed on paper but were not consistently enforced in practice.
Over time, procedure gave way to habit, and habit replaced accountability.
The unanswered question
The most important question is not whether budgets were discussed internally.
FAM leadership has suggested they were handled at committee level.
The question is more fundamental.
If congress did not approve annual budgets, who authorised spending?
Who carried responsibility for financial decisions over this period?
And what mechanism ensured those decisions remained within constitutional bounds?
Those questions matter not because they revisit the past, but because they define whether future control will be credible.
What this reveals
The easiest interpretation is negligence.
The harder interpretation is that a key accountability procedure was not simply missed—it was not enforced.
That shifts the meaning of the finding.
Supporters can tolerate poor results and even administrative mistakes.
What is harder to accept is the normalisation of weak oversight over an extended period.
Because budgets are not just financial documents.
They are authorisations of trust.
And for nearly 10 years, that authorisation appears not to have passed through the correct channel.
The AFC finding is difficult to reconcile with modern sports administration standards.
A decade without tabling budgets is not just unusual. It challenges the basic assumption that congress was functioning as intended.
It raises a deeper concern: not only what went wrong, but how long it continued without correction.
That is the central issue.
Not the absence of a budget alone.
But the absence of interruption.
