The sheer audacity of the whole thing is brilliant, if depressingly predictable. Now, the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) has been slapped with a 12-month ban, a CHF 350,000 fine (which, in real money, is about $440,000—a sum that could buy you a nice German saloon, or perhaps just pay for FAM’s legal photocopying bill).

So, the whole sorry caravan is now trundling off to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, Switzerland, armed with what I assume are extremely expensive excuses. But let’s not be distracted by the main event. This appeal isn’t about reducing the ban; it’s about assigning liability for the impending, multi-million-dollar compensation claims from the now-unemployed players. It’s not a legal defence; it’s a frantic game of financial hot potato.

Let’s be clear about FAM’s position at CAS: they are currently parked, facing the wall, without a reverse gear.

In the world of sports justice, people spend far too long differentiating between the sins. We’re told that a doping “technicality”—where some poor sap accidentally ingested a microscopic trace of something that sounds like a flat-pack furniture instruction—is less severe than outright forgery. Nonsense. When it comes to institutional cheating, the crime is the same: a systematic attempt to pervert the rules. Whether you’re swapping out grandfather’s birth records or swapping out clean urine samples in a Russian lab, the moral transgression is the same as driving a stolen cement mixer through the front of the police station. It’s an integrity breach. It’s intentional. It’s cheating, and the punishment will be equally satisfyingly brutal.

CAS judges are sticklers for paperwork, and FIFA’s evidence is reportedly watertight. They didn’t just suspect the documents were iffy; they apparently went to the foreign registries—Spain, Brazil, Argentina—and pulled the original birth certificates, which, hilariously, contradicted the ones FAM submitted. This is no mere “administrative error,” as FAM’s hapless lawyers are probably trying to spin. That’s what you call it when you accidentally file the wrong tax form. When you submit official records that are fundamentally bogus, FIFA calls it “cheating.”

The prediction is simple: the 12-month ban isn’t going anywhere. CAS might, might, reduce the severity for a player or two if they can prove they were genuinely hiding under a rock the entire time. But the systemic guilt—the sense that FAM was run by a bunch of amateurs who thought a photocopier with a blur function counted as due diligence—that is absolutely sticking. The only thing FAM will gain from the trip to Lausanne is a dull view of Lake Geneva.

While FAM is busy convincing three CAS arbitrators that their forgery was a typo, the suspended players have gathered outside the association’s HQ, not with pitchforks, but with legal demands that are far more terrifying – a multi-million-dollar lawsuit from seven players who are now suing their former paymasters.

It’s an existential crisis that could reduce FAM to the financial equivalent of a damp sock. The demands are staggering: we’re talking about compensation equivalent to at least one year’s salary for seven lads who thought they were national heroes, with the high earners demanding well over a million dollars each. Total liability? We’re firmly in the “needs to be paid by a money bin” category.

The players’ legal argument is beautifully self-serving: institutional reliance. They argue they were “unwitting participants” in the great birth certificate caper. They were simply told they were eligible citizens and trusted FAM—the supposedly member association of FIFA—to handle the documentation.

And this is where the incompetence turns into a liability disaster. If the players can prove FAM was negligent—that the association failed its basic due diligence in verifying the documents it submitted to FIFA—then FAM becomes financially liable for the entire lost income caused by the subsequent FIFA ban. It’s a perfect bureaucratic death spiral: You cheated, you got caught, and now the people you cheated for are demanding you pay them back with interest.

The Football Association of Malaysia is facing a dual disaster. They are almost certainly going to lose at CAS, confirming to the world they are guilty of systemic fraud. And immediately after that, they face potential insolvency from the very players they tried to exploit.

This case is now a global blueprint for disaster. It sets an irreversible standard: football associations worldwide, especially those running shady “heritage” programs, must now demonstrate absolute, forensic, and transparent due diligence. If you cut corners, the cost won’t just be a ban; it’ll be a civil lawsuit that dismantles your entire federation.

So, farewell, FAM. You replaced the hard work of developing home-grown talent with a quick, laminated shortcut. And you proved that the quickest way to ruin a national football dream isn’t through poor coaching, but by trusting someone who produces a fake birth certificate that was contradicted by the real one. In the end, it turns out you can’t polish a forgery.