Why Can’t Southeast Asian Countries Qualify for the World Cup?

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Only once has a team from Southeast Asia appeared at the World Cup. That was Indonesia in 1938 when they were called the Dutch East Indies. It's safe to say a lot has changed since then. To put this into context, Iceland, Angola, Haiti, and Iraq have made the same number of World Cup appearances as Southeast Asia.

That is pretty wild when you think about it. Southeast Asia has nearly 700 million people, roughly eight percent of the world’s population. It is a football-mad region, and a place teams from Europe regularly visit. Yet the national teams are bad. Like really bad.

Only one side, Indonesia, advanced to the third round of Asian World Cup Qualifying, and the odds are very long for them to make it out of their group. Of course, the story is nothing new. Only one Southeast Asian side has made it to the third round of continental qualifying in each of the past two cycles, and both times, those teams finished last.

No Southeast Asian country made it that far in 2006, 2010, or 2014. Even with the World Cup continuing to expand the number of teams that qualify, Southeast Asia remains a global afterthought.

Why can’t Southeast Asian Teams Qualify for the World Cup? There is plenty of blame to go around here. The two main culprits are the football associations themselves, a collection of mismanaged and overly politicized bodies. And then you have FIFA, who hasn’t actually improved access to the World Cup but simply added more teams to make it look as if access had been approved.

Let’s talk about this, shall we? FIFA loved celebrating the fact Oceania was guaranteed a place at the 48-team World Cup. There are 14 counties in that region, but Australia doesn’t count since it places in the AFC. Australia is also home to more than half of Oceania’s population. Essentially, a region with 13 countries and a little over 20 million people has direct access to the World Cup.

Meanwhile, Southeast Asia has nothing but the needlessly long route of AFC qualifying.

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