The scene is not just pathetic; it is an indictment of our national character.

Years ago, I stood on the sidelines of my younger brother’s training sessions, watching acoach pour his sweat, his expertise, and his very soul into a group of children for the insulting sum of RM5 per session. RM5. The price of a single cup of coffee at a roadside stall. And yet, every single week, I watched with growing fury as parents—grown adults who arrived in cars worth tens of thousands—orchestrated a shameful retreat. They would linger in the shadows, wait for the whistle to blow, and then usher their children into the backseat to disappear before the coach could collect that five-ringgit pittance.

I saw the faces of those coaches—men with AFC licenses and years of study—wearing a look of defeated humiliation that no professional should ever endure. This wasn’t a “financial struggle. ” It was a calculated act of theft. It revealed the ugly, parasitic truth of Malaysian football: we claim to be “football lovers,” but we treat the architects of our children’s future like disposable servants.

We are a nation infected by a toxic culture of entitlement. We have been conditioned to believe that because football is “the people’s game, “it should be free, or subsidised to the point of bankruptcy. We demand a “Harimau Malaya” victory on the world stage, yet we refuse to pay for the bricks required to build the foundation.

Today, the struggle continues. My brother’s current academy charges RM50 a month—the price of one fast-food meal for a family. Yet, the “subsidized mindset” remains rampant. More than half of the parents treat this fee as an optional donation, paid only when they feel like it. They wait for “someone else” to foot the bill—a government grant or a corporate sponsor—to save them from the “burden” of an RM50 investment.

Let’s be brutally honest: if you can afford your daily teh tarik ikat tepi and your Netflix subscription, but you “struggle” to find RM50 for your child’s development, you aren’t suffering from poverty. You are suffering from a poverty of priorities.

The hypocrisy is enough to make any rational person scream. We live in a society that comfortably drops RM200 a month for a private math tutor or RM350 for an hour of golf coaching without a single complaint. In those environments, the parent understands they are buying a future. They respect the professional. They pay on time because they value the “prestige.

But the moment the venue shifts to a football pitch, that respect vanishes. Suddenly, the coach is just an “Abang” who should be happy to be there. Suddenly, the curriculum is just “running around. ” This is intellectual dishonesty. By demanding “cheap” football, you are telling your child that their passion is a bargain-bin interest, a second-class hobby that doesn’t deserve the same financial respect as a math equation.

What is most infuriating is that these parents are too blind to see what they are actually sabotaging. A football academy is not just a factory for the next professional star; it is a laboratory for the human soul. The U-6 to U-12 phase is the “Golden Age of Learning,” and you are starving it of resources.

On that pitch, for the price of a few movie tickets, your child is supposed to learn discipline , teamwork , and resilience . They learn the commitment to show up when it’s raining, the humility to respect the whistle, and the emotional armor required to lose a match and stand up again. These are the “soft skills” that corporate seminars charge thousands to teach adults—yet you haggle over RM50 to give them to your child. By demanding everything be “cheap, ” you are teaching your child that excellence is a handout. You are raising a generation that expects a trophy without ever paying the price of admission.

In my previous writing, I spoke of “Technical Debt”—the bankruptcy of skill that occurs when we prioritize winning over learning. But there is a financial equivalent: Operational Debt . When an academy with 50 students cannot survive because parents are “skipping” fees, the entire ecosystem collapses.

A coach forced to spend twenty minutes of a session acting as a debt collector is a coach whose passion is being slowly, painfully extinguished. We are driving our most visionary technical minds into corporate jobs because they cannot feed their families on the “promises” of ungrateful parents. You aren’t “saving money”; you are killing the sport.

Our national dream is a joke if we continue to treat the grassroots like a charity ward. It is time for every parent in this country to pass the mirror test.

Stop complaining about the state of the FAM on social media while you still owe your child’s coach RM50. Stop asking what the country is doing for your child’s development, and start asking why you are so reluctant to support the person actually doing the work. Your child’s dream deserves more than your “loose change” and your pathetic excuses.

When you pay that monthly fee, do it with pride. View it as a vote of confidence in your child’s character. If we are unwilling to fund the foundation of our children’s passion, we have no right to complain when the house never gets built. Excellence is never found in the bargain bin. If you want a world-class future, start by paying world-class respect to the people building it.