Every Eiduladha, while normal people are celebrating the spirit of korban by distributing meat and enjoying a day off, my stomach does a familiar, deeply cynical flip. I know a thing or two about sacrifice, you see. Except mine didn’t involve a divine calling; it felt a lot more like being tied to a stake while a mob of angry football fans took turns throwing rocks at my head. During my twenty years in the utterly mad world of sports marketing, I didn’t just sacrifice my time. I emptied my bank accounts, obliterated my sanity, and put my family’s safety on the line for the glorious, bottomless black hole that is Malaysian football.

The supreme, staggering irony of this entire delusion was laid bare recently with the launch of a book called Kejor, a glossy, self-congratulatory exercise in historical revisionism celebrating Perak FC’s 2018 Malaysia Cup glory. Everyone in Ipoh loves to romanticise the good old days over a cup of white coffee, completely blind to the fact that this historic success led the club towards a financial time bomb. The contract re-negotiations of that era made coach Mehmet Durakovic and his key players some of the most ridiculously, offensively overpaid people in the history of Perak football. It was a golden era; but it was also a legacy of ruin masquerading as royalty, waiting for some poor bastard to inherit the bill.

Which brings us to the bleak September of 2021. Perak FC was flatlining on an operating table, gasping for air under a mountain of unpaid player salaries. Impact Media and Communication (IMC) and a smooth-talking financial backer known as “KJ” tasked me with writing the investment thesis and paperwork for a takeover. By December, I was appointed as a Board Member to fast-track the due diligence. We honestly thought we were turning the page. By January 2022, I stepped down as Board Member, made the CEO and were slowly, painstakingly clearing the 2021 arrears.

Then February hit like a piano dropped from a twentieth-floor window.

We discovered that KJ wasn’t a wealthy saviour; he was a total scammer, a ghost with empty pockets and a magnificent line of bullshit. Worse, he was snugly in bed with “AA”—the protected, untouchable, permanently Teflon “blue-eyed boy” of Perak football. The grift was beautifully, sickeningly simple: IMC was used as a corporate Trojan horse. KJ and AA never gave a toss about football. They intended to use club ownership as political leverage to secure lucrative state government projects, planning to leave IMC abandoned in a ditch with RM15 million in inherited debts while they drove off in the sunset.

March and April of 2022 were a masterclass in operational hell. Armed with nothing but my sports marketing expertise and sheer, unadulterated desperation, I locked myself in rooms with furious players, coaches, agents, and stubborn statutory bodies. I hacked, negotiated, and bludgeoned that RM15 million debt down to RM10 million through sheer force of will and an industrial amount of coffee.

Did I get a pat on the back? Don’t be ridiculous. While I was doing the actual heavy lifting, KJ and AA deployed a proxy company to takeover Perak FC, weaponised the local media, and stoked the fires of fan fury to force IMC out. We demanded Proof of Funds; they produced nothing but toxic online noise and a lot of hot air.

Suddenly, I was the public villain. Banners were hoisted across Ipoh town and the stadium calling me bangsat. My social media became a radioactive wasteland of venom, culminating in literal death threats targeting my wife and kid. And here lies the ultimate, heart-wrenching, head-banging irony: while thousands of keyboard warriors were screaming for my head, the two remaining directors and I were quietly emptying our personal life savings into the club’s account. We were paying player salaries, funding match-day security, and sponsoring away-game travel just to keep the team from dissolving into thin air. We bled ourselves dry for the very people wishing us dead. It was madness.

The climax arrived in a blur of spreadsheets and boardroom drama. Armed with ironclad financial audits and investment papers, We pulled off what can only be described as a corporate miracle. We secured XOX Berhad to buy over the club lock, stock, and barrel. Perak FC was saved from total annihilation. The fans rejoiced, the suits smiled, the players  and coaches paid in full and I finally thought I could get a decent night’s sleep.

But my relief quickly curdled into profound, soul-crushing irritation. Despite our explicit, evidence-backed warnings and the thick dossier of deceit we handed over, XOX made the mind-bogglingly stupid decision to retain AA within the club management. It was a tragedy written in advance. I watched in utter sadness, knowing a catastrophic disaster was waiting to happen.

And oh, how the prophecy fulfilled itself. It didn’t take long for the high-profile train-wreck with coach Lim Teong Kim to dominate the headlines, followed by the inevitable, agonising downward spiral. Before the start of the 2025 season, the club finally closed its doors for good. The exact car crash we screamed bloody murder about had come true, completely destroying the club by the hands of the very parasites we fought so hard to eradicate.

So we come back to Eiduladha, the festival of sacrifice. I look at the wreckage of Perak FC and ask myself: was the korban worth it? There is a special kind of existential exhaustion that comes from sacrificing your wealth, your reputation, and your peace of mind to write a flawless survival script for an institution, only for them to hand the keys right back to the arsonist.

Perak football remains a beautifully orchestrated circus where incompetence is rewarded and accountability is a foreign concept. It is a tragic state of affairs where clubs would rather romanticise their ghosts and live in the past than build a real, sustainable future. I saved the Seladang once, but as it turns out, you simply cannot save a creature that is utterly, single-mindedly determined to slaughter itself.