Who Are We Even Rooting For at the Next World Cup?
When your country doesn't qualify and colonizers feel like strangers, football fandom gets complicated.
The World Cup bracket drops and you scan it twice. Philippines isn't there. Malaysia isn't there. Indonesia made it through qualifiers but the odds are long. So now what?
This is the question that hangs over every four years for most of Southeast Asia. We grow up watching the tournament. We stay up late. We argue in group chats. But we're never actually in it, so we're left picking teams like we're shopping someone else's menu.
Some people go colonial—Spain for the Philippines, Netherlands for Indonesia. That route feels increasingly weird when you're old enough to know what those flags actually represent here. Cheering for the country that carved up yours for 300 years requires either ignorance or a very specific kind of irony.
Others go diaspora. You have a cousin in Canada, an uncle in Australia, a high school friend who moved to Germany. Fandom becomes a passport stamp. It's not deep, but it's personal enough to care when they lose.
Then there's the anywhere-but-them crowd. You don't need a team. You just need someone to beat the usual winners. Argentina's out in the group stage? Good. Brazil chokes in the semis? Perfect. It's spite fandom, and spite fandom is valid.
The real gap is that we don't have a national team worth the name. Not one that can survive CONCACAF, let alone UEFA. And that's not some romantic failure. It's structural—underinvestment, mismanagement, corrupt football associations treating the sport like a patronage racket instead of a development pipeline.
The Azkals had a moment. Garuda had hype. Harimau Malaya gets love during AFF. But World Cup qualifying is a different level, and we're decades behind in infrastructure, coaching, youth systems, and funding that isn't siphoned off before it hits the pitch.
So we watch as outsiders. We pick a second-choice team and pretend it's enough. But every four years, the same thought comes back: this tournament wasn't built for us, and our governments never cared enough to change that.
Maybe next cycle you'll root for Japan, or South Korea, or whichever underdog draws the group of death. Maybe you won't watch at all. Either way, the gap between the tournament and the region that actually loves football stays exactly the same.
