Been away from these pages for a bit, but the FAM Electoral Congress creeping closer on the calendar is exactly the kind of story that pulls me back in. Not because I want to tell you who to vote for. I don’t have a vote, and neither do most of you reading this. Yet I think we’re about to watch a genuinely important process unfold, and most fans will only experience it as headlines and Facebook comment sections rather than something they actually understand.

Quick recap for anyone who’s lost the thread since January. FAM’s entire Exco resigned collectively, following the fallout from the fake documents scandal involving seven capped internationals, which triggered a twelve-month suspension from FIFA. Out of that mess came a genuine structural reset. In June, an Extraordinary Congress approved sweeping amendments to the FAM Statute, expanding the pool of affiliated members eligible to vote from 20 to as many as 39, bringing Malaysia Super League clubs in as voting stakeholders for the first time, alongside the traditional state association bloc, though Kelantan and Perlis remain excluded under their own separate suspensions. At the same time, the Exco itself has actually shrunk, from 17 seats down to 11, which former deputy president Datuk Mohd Yusoff Mahadi has pointed out means the race for a chair will be tighter than it’s been in years: more voters, fewer seats, sharper competition. The Electoral Congress is now set for September 17, with a new president, three vice-presidents, and that slimmer executive committee up for grabs. This time, the AFC is directly overseeing the process, which its secretary-general Windsor Paul John has framed around a simple principle. More members means the nomination bar can come down, and roughly ten people could realistically qualify to stand once the new thresholds apply, a deliberate widening after years of complaints that the old system was too closed.

That widening cuts both ways, though. Candidates for president and Exco seats will now need at least five years of relevant experience, which is meant to filter for seriousness without shutting the door on newer names entirely. And Datuk Jamal Nasir, a former international, said recently that AFC supervision should finally put to rest old fears about the nomination process itself; there were allegations in the past of blank forms being pushed through. But he also flagged something worth sitting with: as of now, the revised statutes, the electoral regulations, and the AFC’s own governance review haven’t actually been made public. So the very framework this election runs on is still, for the ordinary fan, mostly a black box. That’s not a great look for a federation trying to rebuild trust from zero.

On the candidates’ side, the field is still taking shape, with several names from across business, sport administration, and so on reported in the press as weighing a run at the presidency, and affiliates already putting forward their own picks for vice-president and exco seats. There’s also been public debate over whether the nomination requirements still favour candidates with existing institutional backing, and a separate push in some quarters to require a minimum degree qualification for anyone standing for leadership. Perhaps most tellingly, one former FAM president has already publicly waved off any suggestion of a comeback, saying plainly that it’s time to give younger candidates the chair, a small but telling signal of where sentiment is heading ahead of September.

Here’s where I want to plant my flag, and it’s less about any individual name than about what fans should actually be watching for. First, process literacy. Most Malaysian football fans can tell you a manager’s preferred formation before they can tell you how many affiliated members actually get a vote at Congress, or why a club’s vote and a state association’s vote aren’t the same thing. If we want FAM’s governance to genuinely improve, fans need to understand who the electorate is, not just who the candidates are. Second, financial stewardship has to be treated as seriously as tactics and transfer news. A federation that’s been through a FIFA suspension and a governance overhaul in the same year doesn’t get to lead with vision statements alone; whoever takes over needs a credible, unglamorous, detailed plan for FAM’s finances and administration, not just charisma on stage. Third, grassroots development can’t stay the one line every candidate recites and no candidate is held to. It should be the single measurable thing fans push every candidate to be specific about: how many more community coaches, how many more accessible pitches, how many more kids actually get a real pathway, and by when.

The kind of leadership Malaysian football needs coming out of this Congress isn’t necessarily the loudest or the most famous name on a shortlist that’s shrinking as we speak. It’s someone who can hold a federation together through public scrutiny, who treats transparency as a starting condition rather than a PR exercise once AFC oversight eventually steps back, and who understands that the trust fans lost over the past year gets rebuilt in small, visible, repeated actions, not one sweeping manifesto delivered from a podium.

So here’s my ask, as much to myself as to anyone else covering this: over the next two months, let’s spend less energy speculating about who’ll win and more energy explaining how the vote actually works, what the new 39-member structure means for who holds real power, and what questions every candidate should be made to answer before delegates cast a single ballot on September 17. An informed fanbase is the best accountability mechanism FAM will ever have, better than any single president, no matter who wins.