Suppose you invite 39 of your closest friends to dinner. You step into the kitchen and present them with two options for the main course: boiled cabbage or lukewarm tap water.

Five of your guests, who have clearly lost their minds, vote for the cabbage. Twenty guests, who also have clearly lost their minds, vote for the tap water. The remaining 14 guests look at you in utter disbelief, fold their arms, and refuse to touch either because both options are appalling.

Now, if you were a sane human being, you would look at that room and realize that more than a third of your friends would rather starve than consume anything you’ve cooked. You’d apologize, put the apron away, and order pizza.

But if you are a football analyst, you don’t do that. Instead, you bang your fists on the dining table, and announce to the fans that tap water has won a thumping 80% landslide victory.

Which brings me, inevitably, to the recent Extraordinary Congress of the Football Association of Malaysia.

The headlines were predictably breathless. Datuk Ab Ghani Hassan secured the presidency, crushing his opponent with a 20-to-5 vote tally. The spin doctors immediately went to work, plugging those two numbers into a calculator, popping out an “80% mandate,” and slapping each other on the back like they’d just landed a man on Mars.

Except, it isn’t an 80% mandate. It isn’t even close.

Because buried at the bottom of the scoreboard, tucked away like a dirty secret, was another number: 14. Fourteen delegates—out of 39 in total—sat on their hands and abstained.

In the world of official tallies, abstentions are treated like background noise. Statisticians strip them out of the equation faster than a bad liver, pretending those people simply wandered off to use the lavatory or forgot how to raise a hand. They tell us that abstentions “don’t count.”

What utter rubbish.

An abstention is not a ghost. It is not an absence of thought. It is an active, conscious, deliberate decision to walk into a room, look both candidates dead in the eye, and say: “No. Neither of you.” In many ways, abstaining takes significantly more effort than simply nodding along with whatever candidate bought you the nicer lunch beforehand.

When 14 out of 39 voters abstain, that isn’t apathy. That is a massive, deafening protest. It is over 35 percent of your entire voting assembly looking at the leadership options on offer and deciding that sitting quietly on the fence is preferable to supporting either vision for the future.

If you do the proper math—the math taught to children before they learn how to become politicians—Ghani didn’t get 80% of the room. He got 20 votes out of 39. That is 51.28 percent.

He won, but he didn’t sweep to power on a wave of overwhelming unity; he squeaked past the finish line by a single body. Nearly half the room either voted against him or refused to back him.

To ignore those 14 abstentions as “passive noise” is not just lazy; it is dangerous. It creates a delusion of grandeur. It allows a new leader to march into the boardroom believing he has a mandate from God, when in reality, more than a third of his own house is waiting for him to trip over the carpet.

Governing a sports body—or anything else, for that matter—requires consensus. It requires people to actually believe in where you are taking them. If you pretend that abstaining delegates simply don’t exist, you miss the crucial signal they are sending: that the system is fractured, the candidates were unconvincing, and trust is in short supply.

You can erase abstentions from the final percentage on a piece of paper, but you cannot erase them from the room. They are still sitting in those chairs, watching, waiting, and holding their applause.

And if the new president thinks he can lead a national association while ignoring the fact that over a third of his electorate couldn’t even bring themselves to vote for him, he is in for a very, very rude awakening.