The roar of the crowd is a magnificent thing. It used to be reserved for a winning goal, a spectacular save, or perhaps a properly executed power slide. Now? It’s the blood-sport cheer for the ritualistic sacrifice of a high-profile target. We don’t want accountability anymore; we want catharsis. And it’s making us spectacularly stupid.

Take the Malaysian football naturalisation scandal—a symphony of bureaucratic incompetence and forged documents that left the national program looking less world-class and more like a cheap photocopy. This whole fiasco wasn’t just a misfiled form; it was an act of deliberate, fraudulent deceit designed to put unqualified boots on the pitch.

Naturally, the entire country performed the predictable danse macabre and pointed its collective, furious finger straight at TMJ, the program’s visionary. Why? Because the man has a title and a famous face. He’s the most recognisable head on the silver platter. By ritually sacrificing the highest-profile leader, we satisfy our primal hunger for spectacle and, in doing so, conveniently grant amnesty to the quiet, corrupt functionaries who actually did the dirty work. It’s the laziest form of justice known to mankind.

We love the narrative simplicity. Blaming the boss is like blaming gravity when you trip: easy, immediate, and utterly lacking in imagination. We demand a King to fall, not a process to be fixed or, God forbid, a middle-management functionary to be jailed. It takes the square root of zero effort to shout, “It happened on his watch!”

Sure, a leader is responsible for the system—the big picture, the grand strategy, the quality of the hire. He’s the architect who designed a house that, unfortunately, came down due to a basement full of dodgy contractors. That is a failure of management. But did the boss personally get his hands dirty? Hunched over a desk in a back room with a Bic pen, carefully forging a birth certificate, or inventing a phantom grandmother from Melaka? Absolutely not.

The leader’s fault is a failure of oversight and the lack of micro-managing. The subordinate’s fault is a failure of integrity, and crucially, a wilful act of malice—the difference between leaving the door unlocked and actually stealing the silverware.

Let’s drag the actual perpetrators out into the spotlight, shall we? These are the Ghosts in the Machine: the sporting director, the administrators, the agents, the ‘consultants’ who identified the players, vetted the applications, and intentionally falsified the documents.

These are the quiet assassins of integrity. They didn’t just fail to follow policy; they actively fabricated lineage and citizenship records, thereby debasing the very concept of representing the country. They looked the policy handbook in the eye, spat on it, and then forged the required signature. This is not managerial negligence; this is a crime—a deliberate betrayal of the program’s vision. And yet, the public discourse treats them as mere background noise, the theatrical extras in the main event of the leader’s dramatic downfall.

We treat this like a bad play. The star is fired, we all clap, and then we leave the theatre while the actual thief who robbed the coat check is still standing there, polishing his shoes, waiting for the next scandal to deflect attention. Our outrage is cheap; we want the scandal to end with a satisfying, theatrical resignation rather than a slow, difficult pursuit of operational, ground-level justice.

This obsession with spectacle over substance is not just morally obtuse, it’s actively corrupting. It’s perpetuated by a lazy media apparatus that prioritises the headline click—Prince Fails!—over the messy, difficult truth—Mid-level Manager Commits Felony.

This lazy lens shields the true operational cancer. When the low-level paper pushers who created the fake family trees see that their direct, deliberate misconduct is effectively ignored while the boss takes the fall, it doesn’t create deterrence. It creates a blueprint for impunity. It tells every functionary in every corner of every organization: “Go on, commit the crime! The boss will take the bullet.”

The sacrifice is over, the crowd is satisfied, and the real criminals walk free, waiting for the next scapegoat to ascend. And we, the public, are the eager, clapping fools who cheer them on their way. We didn’t seek justice; we just sought a good show. And we got exactly the outcome we deserved: none at all.