Football thriving despite country’s troubled past

FOOTBALL was brought to Cambodia by French colonisers in the early part of the 20th century.

Even before the country gained independence from France in 1953, they had started competing internationally with the Cambodian Football Federation founded in 1933.

Cambodia played alongside Laos, North Vietnam and South Vietnam in the IndoChina Cup in the 1940s.

They joined FIFA in 1956 and had their best-ever result when finishing fourth in the 1972 Asian Cup, despite being in the midst of a civil war at the time.

When Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975, football, like so much else in the country, was wiped out.

The game was banned by Pol Pot as it was considered non-essential for his agrarian revolution. When Vietnam deposed the Khmer Rouge in 1979, the inception of a soccer league was considered one of the things needed to get the country, which had lost nearly a quarter of its citizens in the genocide, back to some level of normality.

The current Cambodian soccer league was formed in 1982 and for a number of years was won by teams representing government ministries such as the Ministry of Transport or the Ministry of Defence.

The national team re-entered the international fray in 1995 when they commenced participation in the South-East Asian games. However, like for much of the country, it would take football a generation, or more, to recover from what the Khmer Rouge did. By 2014, Cambodia had plummeted to an all-time low of 201, out of 209 nations, in the FIFA world rankings.

However, there has been an improvement in recent years, with more investment in developing young talent, and the recruitment of a big name like Japan’s Keisuke Honda, still playing with Vitesse in Holland, to manage the national team, they currently sit 171st in the rankings.