While the world was watching Spain and Argentina, South-East Asia is getting ready for something else

Vietnam arrive as defending champions, and they look like the region’s most coherent football project.

A few days ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Jakarta speaking to the Indian community. He talked about the World Cup, he joked that every time he visits Indonesia, football fever seems to be in the air. Indonesia is one of those places where football is always discussed with the seriousness of politics and the emotion of a religion. While his reference to football was to highlight that he always visits Indonesia during a FIFA World Cup year, he certainly was briefed about the passionate support for the game in the South-East Asian region.

The FIFA World Cup final between Spain and Argentina has barely faded from television screens, while another tournament was preparing to begin almost unnoticed outside the region. The Asean Championship starts on July 24 and concludes on August 26. That is how South-East Asian football often works. The world arrives for the spectacle while the region quietly keeps building.

The Asean Championship is now 30 years old. When it began in 1996, it started like a modest regional competition. Today, it involves 10 teams, 10 stadiums across nine countries, a home-and-away group stage, and a level of fan engagement that many larger football markets would envy.

Opening match

The opening match is Cambodia against Singapore in Phnom Penh. If you had asked a football executive in Europe twenty years ago which country would host the largest stadium in an Asean tournament, Cambodia would not have been high on the list. Yet Morodok Techo National Stadium holds 60,000 people, something improbable for Cambodian football a generation ago.

Stadiums are imperfect indicators of sporting success, but they are excellent indicators of political ambition. Governments rarely build large stadiums because of possible ticket revenue, they build them to signal modernity, capacity and relevance. I have always thought South-East Asia is one of the most underrated football regions in the world.

Not because the football is perfect — it isn’t — but because the relationship between football and society is unusually visible. Take the away fans. In Europe, travelling supporters are taken for granted. In Asean, they tell a different story. Millions of people move around the region for work. A Vietnamese worker in Singapore, a Cambodian worker in Thailand, an Indonesian family in Malaysia — these migration patterns create ready-made football communities. When Indonesia play away, they often find supporters already living in the host country. The tournament becomes less a series of international matches and more a map of South-East Asian mobility.

Vietnam, the defending champion

Vietnam arrive as defending champions, and they look like the region’s most coherent football project. Under Kim Sang-Sik, the former South Korean World Cup player, Vietnam have done something unusual in Asian football: they have connected the senior team and the under-23 programme. The results have been almost suspiciously consistent—2024 ASEAN title, 2025 ASEAN U23 success, 2026 SEA Games Gold(U23), and a third-place finish in AFC U23 performances. It feels less like a golden generation appearing by accident and more like an institution taking shape.

Thailand remains the old empire. They still carry the aura of the region’s historical power, the way Brazil carries an aura in South America even during less dominant periods. But empires rarely notice when the gap begins to close.

Indonesia is the country that fascinates everyone in football business. The population is enormous, the fan culture is volcanic, and the commercial upside is obvious. A recent goal celebration by the former English club Oxford United young star Marselino Ferdinan against Saudi Arabia went viral far beyond South-East Asia. That may sound trivial, but in modern football a celebration becoming a meme is extremely valuable. It means the moment has escaped sport and entered culture.

Singapore is the counterargument to population determinism. They recently qualified for the 2027 AFC Asian Cup ahead of much larger countries, including India and Bangladesh. Under Gavin Lee and Hariss Harun, Singapore have become a reminder that organisation can occasionally outperform demographics.

Hot topic: naturalisation

Then there is the subject every federation discusses in corridors rather than at podiums: naturalisation. Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore and Malaysia have all increasingly used foreign-born or naturalised players. In South-East Asia, where dual citizenship is often not available for sporting purposes, players frequently have to give up their original nationality. That makes each decision more consequential than many observers realise. The interesting question is not whether these players are “truly” national — football has always been shaped by migration — but whether the federation has built an environment compelling enough for someone to change their legal identity for it.

Malaysia’s recent administrative crisis over naturalisation shows how quickly the issue can become political. Hovering above the tournament is another curiosity: FIFA’s proposed FIFA Asean Cup later this year, with invited teams including India and, at least initially, China. The project remains hazy. But its existence raises a classic football question: what happens when a competition that grew organically suddenly finds itself sharing space with a globally-branded version of itself?

This is where the current Asean Championship becomes more interesting than its marketing suggests. For three decades, it has grown because South-East Asian audiences cared about it. Not because anyone told them to or linked development funding to it. The colourful banners, the packed away sections, the loud anthems, the shirt-wearing commuters on match day — these were created by supporters before they were monetised by sponsors.

Indian fans should probably pay attention. For years, they stayed awake at impossible hours to watch Europe. The Asean Championship offers something different: international football in a friendly time zone, free on YouTube, and taking place in countries that are geographically close but often absent from Indian football conversations.

Today, when the first whistle goes in Phnom Penh, most of the global football industry will still be analysing Spain’s press against Argentina. Meanwhile, South-East Asia will be doing what it has quietly done for 30 years: turning football into a regional language. And the rest of the world will eventually discover that the story was happening here all along.

(The writer is the co-founder of SkaSports, Investments Pvt Ltd and Director of two Football clubs in Cambodia and Singapore)

Published on July 23, 2026