In about a month, delegates will walk into FAM’s elective congress and choose the people who will steer Malaysian football for the next term. By any measure, it is one of the most consequential congresses in the association’s recent history — coming off a year that saw the entire Exco resign, a citizenship scandal that cost the Harimau Malaya their Asian Cup ticket, and an AFC-led governance overhaul Malaysia had put off for far too long.

But another vote is happening in the wider football world, and Malaysia has said almost nothing about it.

Gianni Infantino wants a fourth term as FIFA president. Since he announced his candidacy in Vancouver back in April, the mood around him has shifted from “unopposed coronation” to genuine uncertainty. The Football Association of Wales pulled its backing. So did Finland. 

Germany’s Bernd Neuendorf has been consistently sceptical for years. Norway never came on board in the first place. The collapse of the FIFA Forward Enterprise plan — the scheme to sell a stake in the World Cup’s commercial rights to private investors — turned quiet unease into open rebellion in parts of Europe, and even prompted Asia’s own confederation to write FIFA a letter accusing it of “fundamental weaknesses” in how it consults its members.

That is not a small thing. When the AFC — Malaysia’s own confederation — signs a letter like that, it tells you the discomfort with Infantino’s FIFA is no longer confined to Europe’s usual suspects. It has reached the room Malaysia sits in.

So where is our voice?

I have looked, and I cannot find it. No public statement from FAM. No comment from anyone in the running for the presidency. Just silence, at a moment when a growing number of our fellow associations have decided silence is no longer good enough.

I will say plainly where I stand: I am against Infantino continuing in this role. Not out of personal animus, but because a decade in, the pattern is familiar — a presidency that talks about transparency while resisting scrutiny, that has drawn criticism for courting political relationships far outside the game, and that keeps finding creative ways to extend a mandate that was supposed to be capped. Three terms was meant to mean three terms. Instead we are being asked to wave through a fourth.

I understand why FAM’s silence is, in one sense, unsurprising. This is an association mid-reconstruction, with an AFC minder in the room and a presidential race of its own to sort out first. Nobody wants to pick a fight with FIFA. At the same time, your own house is still being rebuilt, and there is a fair argument that a federation in Malaysia’s position should be careful about where it spends its political capital.

But here is what makes this moment different: whoever becomes FAM president next month inherits more than a domestic mandate. Malaysia currently has a presence on the FIFA Council, which means our next football leader may well walk into the room where Infantino’s fourth term gets decided — not as a bystander, but as someone with an actual vote and a voice in that process. Malaysian football fans deserve to know, before the congress and not after it, where the candidates stand. Not vague diplomatic language. An actual position.

This is not a call for FAM to pick a side for the sake of picking a side. It is a call for honesty. If our candidates support Infantino, say so, and say why. If they have concerns, say that too. What is genuinely hard to defend is offering our members no answer at all, while associations from Cardiff to Helsinki to Frankfurt have found the courage to state theirs.

Malaysian football has spent this year relearning, painfully, what happens when governance is treated as an afterthought. The FIFA presidency is not our election. But how our next leadership handles it will tell us a great deal about whether this year’s lessons landed, or whether we have simply changed the faces in the room while keeping the same silence.

I would rather Malaysia be late to this conversation than absent from it entirely. A month out, there is still time to speak.