FAM’s new era has an old governance problem

 The Football Association of Malaysia’s latest election was supposed to signal renewal. Instead, it has raised fresh questions about compliance, accountability and trust.

FAM’s first election under its new governance framework produced an awkward result: a new leadership, but an old question about whether its own rules would be followed.

Why did a known eligibility problem involving the electoral committee remain unresolved until election day?

This is more than a question about who sat on the electoral committee. It goes to whether FAM’s overhaul will hold when its own procedures become inconvenient.

The Football Association of Malaysia had spent months rebuilding after Fifa sanctions over doctored documentation involving seven players.

It rewrote its statutes, cut the executive committee to 11 members, tightened eligibility requirements and accepted greater Asian Football Confederation (AFC) involvement.

Those measures were meant to restore trust in an association whose governance had come under intense scrutiny.

Then came the first real test.

FAM knew before the Sept 17 congress that questions had been raised over the qualifications of electoral committee chairman and deputy chairman. The matter that they had to have legal qualifications had already been reported.

There was time to resolve it. Instead, it reached the congress floor.

AFC general secretary Windsor John told delegates that the committee did not meet the requirements set out in FAM’s own statutes.

He also warned that the election could be challenged, potentially at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

Delegates voted unanimously to proceed.

That sequence is hard to square with the promise of a new governance culture.

FAM had options. It could have replaced the committee or settled the eligibility issue before the congress.

It could even have postponed the election, with AFC oversight discussed as one possible route.

It chose to proceed.

Sports Commissioner Arrifin Ghani later made the basic principle clear: delegates cannot simply agree to go against their constitution.

That principle needs little explanation. A constitution exists to impose limits, especially when following it becomes inconvenient.

If a majority can set aside a provision simply because it wants the process to continue, the document becomes less a safeguard than a formality.

What makes this episode harder to dismiss as an oversight is that the electoral committee requirement formed part of the statutory framework FAM had adopted only in June.

This was not an obscure provision inherited from a distant administration. It was part of the new system that FAM itself had put forward as part of its governance overhaul.

That is why the episode deserves scrutiny beyond the immediate dispute.

A provision should not become enforceable only after someone complains. The absence of a formal challenge does not turn a breach into compliance.

Nor is CAS an easy answer. Legal proceedings cost money, and Malaysian clubs already operate under heavy financial pressure.

A safeguard that requires a club to spend heavily to enforce a provision FAM should have observed itself is hardly a satisfactory first line of defence.

The wider issue, then, is not whether FAM has rewritten its statutes. It has.

The question is whether the new structure will influence decisions inside the association when it gets in the way.

That is the harder measure of governance reform. It is not the number of clauses rewritten or seats removed from a committee, but what happens when those provisions place limits on the people running the association.

FAM has already been through Fifa sanctions, an AFC governance review, the mass resignation of its previous executive committee and a wholesale statutory fix.

After such a reckoning, the first election under the new make-up should have offered a straightforward opportunity to demonstrate discipline.

Instead, the process itself produced another governance question.

That is the problem the new administration must now address. Not merely the prospect of a legal challenge, but the doubts created when FAM appeared willing to proceed despite a concern over its own newly adopted concept.

The uncomfortable irony is that the episode came at the very moment FAM needed to demonstrate that the revamp was more than structural.

A new president can bring new names to the executive table, and a new statute can redraw the structure. Neither can establish a different culture by itself.

The new administration will have to do that through decisions.

Its first challenge, therefore, is not to announce another beginning. It is to show, when the next difficult call arrives, that FAM’s standards apply to FAM too.

That is the point at which reform stops being a document and becomes a practice. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.