Happy 95th anniversary, FAM

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 11 -- It has almost been a century since its establishment, but the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) is still standing tall as the country’s governing body for the number one sport in Malaysia.

FAM has seen the evolution of not only the national squad through the years, but also charted the course of the development of football in Malaysia since being founded on Sept 11, 1926 in a conference at the Selangor Club Field here.

In conjunction with its 95th anniversary, FAM shared its history in a statement today, when five state associations, Selangor, Perak, Melaka, Negeri Sembilan and Singapore, came together and founded the Malayan Football Association (MFA).

“They viewed that a governing body was needed to supervise international and domestic footballing activities as the HMS Malaya Cup competition, introduced in 1921, was only responsible for that competition. The committee members finally decided to create the MFA while meeting in Singapore in 1925.

“The first MFA president was John Middleton Sime, an accountant from Scotland who hailed from the family that established Sime Darby. He was chosen on Sept 11, 1926, the founding date of MFA, marking the start of the country’s football governing body that celebrates its 95th anniversary today,” the statement read.

FAM has had many achievements, including organising the Merdeka Tournament that began in 1957, followed by the golden era of national football in the 1970s, when Malaysia qualified to the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, and then winning the bronze in the 1974 Asian Games, and qualifying for the next two Asian Games finals in 1976 and 1980 consecutively.

Malaysia also qualified for the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, the last time the country has competed at the world’s most elite sporting event.

FAM, however, struggled in the 1990s, when the domestic football scene was mired by corruption scandals, which some say marked the start of the decline in the national squad’s performance.

But after nearly two decades of lacklustre performances at the international level, the Harimau Malaya awoke, with the Under-23 national football squad winning the gold medal at the SEA Games in Vientiane, Laos in 2009 before successfully defending it two years later at the 2011 Jakarta SEA Games.

Not wanting to be eclipsed by their juniors’ successes, the senior squad carved out victories of their own, winning their first-ever AFF Suzuki Cup in 2010, and becoming runner-ups in 2014 and 2018.

Determined to chart future successes at the international stage, FAM introduced the FAM Roadmap, F:30, which was launched by FIFA president Gianni Infantino in 2018, in an effort to enter the ranks of the five best Asian countries in terms of football administration come 2030.

Meanwhile, former national striker Akmal Rizal Ahmad Rakhli expressed hope that FAM would focus on planning a strategy to ensure that the Harimau Malaya squad, currently ranked 154th in the world, would dominate the Southeast Asian region and progress further up internationally in the future.

“We know that Vietnam is dominating at the ASEAN level and FAM needs to find a way for Malaysia to become the best ASEAN team first,” the former 39-year-old Kedah player told Bernama.

He said FAM also needed to draft a long-term plan, especially at the grassroots level to develop a better footballing generation, and not be too dependent on the National Football Development Programme.

-- BERNAMA