FAM Election 2026 Explained: Candidates, Vote & Reforms

On 17 September 2026 the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) elected a new president: Ab Ghani Hassan, by 20 votes to 5. It was the second time in nineteen months that Malaysian football’s governing body had chosen a leader, and the first vote held under statutes rewritten after the worst governance crisis in the association’s history. This page has the result and the new committee first, then explains what was decided, who stood, how FAM arrived here and what the winner inherits. It was first published on 9 September 2026 and updated on 15 and 17 September.

The result

Ab Ghani Hassan was elected FAM president on 17 September 2026, taking 20 of the 25 votes cast at the Second Extraordinary Congress in Petaling Jaya against five for Shahril Mokhtar. It was a landslide by any measure. Shahril accepted the result the same day and ruled out legal action.

The rest of the new 11-member executive committee, per Malay Mail’s vote tallies and the committee list published by Makan Bola:

Post	Elected	Votes
President	Ab Ghani Hassan	20 (Shahril Mokhtar 5)
Vice-president 1	Rosmadi Ismail	15 (Firdaus Mohamed 5, Syed Yazid Syed Omar 5)
Vice-president 2	MFL president, ex officio	–
Vice-president 3	N. Saaran	18 (Afizal Abu Othman 7)
Exco, state FAs (3 seats)	Azizudin Shariff, Azhar Jamaluddin, Alijus Sipil	19, 19, 15
Exco, clubs (2 seats)	Kamarudin Hassan, Syed Mahadi Syed Hassan	15, 15
Exco, professional football	Zainal Abidin Hassan	22
Exco, women’s football	Suraya Yaacob	15

Ghani’s first words were about confidence. “First, there is a crisis of confidence,” Malay Mail quoted him as saying. “We must overcome this to win back the trust of all stakeholders, football supporters, and Malaysians.” He said the committee would review and address every issue raised in the AFC audit, with specifics to follow its first meeting, and set the national team the target of dominating ASEAN again. He also confirmed he will give up the MFL presidency, telling FMT he hoped the handover would take only a month but that he could not leave the league without a president; no successor has been named. Because the MFL president sits on the FAM committee as vice-president 2, his replacement at the league will also fill that seat.

The eligibility question was not resolved; it was voted past. The New Straits Times reported that delegates chose to proceed with the Congress despite acknowledging that the electoral committee chairman did not meet the legal-qualification requirement, and Kosmo described a tense session in which the issue was raised from the floor before the vote went ahead. With Shahril declining to challenge the outcome, the immediate risk of a Court of Arbitration for Sport case has receded, but the defect is on the record. Ultras Malaya turned up at the venue and handed FAM a memorandum on governance and integrity, which the association confirmed receiving. JDT owner Tunku Ismail congratulated Ghani and the new committee.

What is being decided

The election took place at FAM’s Second Extraordinary Congress of 2026, where the association’s affiliates — the state football associations and the clubs — vote to fill posts for the remainder of the 2025–2029 term. The headline contest is the presidency, but the ballot goes deeper than that. According to the nominations confirmed by the electoral committee on 3 September, there was a three-way contest for the post of vice-president 1 (Rosmadi Ismail, Firdaus Mohamed and Syed Yazid Syed Omar), a two-way contest for vice-president 3 (N. Saaran and Afizal Abu Othman), and contested elections for executive committee seats representing the state FAs, the clubs, professional football and the women’s game.

Under the new statutes the executive committee is smaller than before. The AFC-drafted reforms adopted in June reduce it to 11 members, abolish the deputy president position, cut the number of vice-presidents and tighten the eligibility rules for anyone seeking office. Professional clubs also gain a larger formal role inside the association. In other words, the winner on 17 September runs a different FAM from the one that existed a year ago.

The two candidates

Ab Ghani Hassan is the president of the Malaysian Football League (MFL), the body that runs the Super League and the domestic cup competitions. His campaign, as reported by Sinar Daily, has centred on governance and development. Shahril Mokhtar is deputy president of the Football Association of Selangor, the state body behind Selangor FC. Free Malaysia Today describes the pair as bringing contrasting administrative and corporate strengths to the contest.

The field was expected to have a third name. Hamidin Mohd Amin, FAM president from 2018 to 2025 and now its honorary president and a FIFA Council member, reportedly received the most nominations from affiliates: Inside World Football cited reports of 12 nominations for Hamidin against seven for Ab Ghani and four for Shahril. On 4 September he ruled himself out, saying, in Malay Mail’s account, that stepping aside gave FAM its best chance of entering a new era without division. That left a straight fight.

Not everyone is celebrating the field. Former FAM executive committee member Christopher Raj told FMT on 9 September that candidates with poor track records would become a liability to the association, warning that this was “not the platform to seek fame and glamour”.

How Malaysian football got here

The road to this election runs through the forged-documents scandal that has defined Malaysian football since 2025.

• February 2025. Joehari Ayub succeeds Hamidin as president, elected unopposed for the 2025–2029 term.
• August 2025. Joehari resigns after six months, citing personal reasons. Under Article 42 of the FAM statutes, deputy president Yusoff Mahadi becomes acting president.
• September 2025. FIFA finds that falsified documents were used to register seven foreign-born players, fines FAM CHF 350,000 and bans the players for 12 months.
• 28 January 2026. The entire executive committee resigns, eleven months into its mandate. Yusoff says the step is taken to uphold good governance and to avert the risk of a FIFA suspension. General secretary Noor Azman Rahman continues to run day-to-day operations with AFC support, and an AFC team led by deputy general secretary Vahid Kardany begins a review of the association.
• March 2026. The Court of Arbitration for Sport dismisses FAM’s appeal. The fine stands and the player bans are confirmed for official matches.
• June 2026. The AFC proposes 94 new articles for FAM’s statutes, including the cut to an 11-member executive committee. On 4 June the affiliates approve the package unanimously.
• 3–4 September 2026. Candidates are confirmed; Hamidin withdraws.
• 17 September 2026. Election day.

The pattern is hard to miss. Every stage — the resignation, the review, the rewrite — was a response to external pressure from FIFA and the AFC. This election is meant to be the point at which FAM starts governing itself again.

The row over the electoral committee

A week before the vote, the process itself came under scrutiny. Article 4.5 of FAM’s 2026 Electoral Code, approved by Congress in June, states that the chair and deputy chair of the electoral committee “shall be qualified to practise law”. Professor Abdullah Mohamad Said has chaired the committee since 2020, oversaw the 2025 election and signed the letters confirming this month’s candidates. Inside World Football and the New Straits Times have reported that his published university profile lists qualifications in town planning and environmental science but no legal qualification.

That does not by itself prove he is ineligible, and Abdullah has said all nominations were checked against FAM’s statutes and procedures. But as of 9 September neither FAM nor the AFC had answered questions on the point, and the NST has warned that an unresolved eligibility question could expose the result to legal challenge. For an association trying to prove it has cleaned up its governance, the question of who is refereeing the election is not a small one.

What the winner inherits

The in-tray is long. The senior national team is being rebuilt under interim head coach Tan Cheng Hoe after the collapse of the naturalisation project, with the FIFA ranking barely above its two-decade low and the seven banned players’ suspensions running into late 2026. The current squad is drawn almost entirely from the domestic league. There is good news at youth level, where Malaysia’s Under-20s qualified for the 2027 AFC U20 Asian Cup on 6 September, but the AFC audit’s criticisms were about how the association is run rather than how its teams play, and fixing the first is meant to enable the second.

Then there is the relationship with the clubs and the MFL. Ab Ghani’s candidacy means the league’s own president could take charge of the federation, which some will read as unity of purpose and others as concentration of power. Shahril’s candidacy carries the weight of Selangor, historically the most influential state body in the game. Whichever way the affiliates vote, the new statutes give the clubs more of a say than they have ever had.

The final week

Updated 15 September 2026.

The campaign turned on money and on conflicts of interest. Shahril Mokhtar told the New Straits Times that FAM’s 2025 audited accounts show RM2.58 million spent on fines, and pledged to redirect that kind of money to grassroots development. Scoop reported that the AFC’s governance audit found FAM had not tabled annual budgets for Congress approval since 2016, a finding Shahril has cited against calls for continuity. Youth and Sports Minister Taufiq Johari weighed in to say the incoming leadership should focus on developing football from the grassroots up rather than merely running the association.

Ab Ghani Hassan has campaigned on steadiness rather than promises, and the NST reported him shunning big pledges. The question that follows him is his day job: an analyst quoted by the NST urged him to resign as MFL president before the vote to show sincerity, and the “one man, two roles” criticism has run through the week. Ghani has also, per Scoop, rejected the suggestion that his candidacy carries the blessing of JDT owner Tunku Ismail. He picked up a notable endorsement when former national youth coach Bojan Hodak, who worked with him at the MFL, backed him publicly.

Two governance notes. Former international Jamal Nasir Ismail warned FAM against using its official media channels to weigh in on the election debate. And the Selangor FA formally demanded clarity from FAM on the electoral committee’s legal standing; as of 15 September there had still been no public clarification of the chairman’s eligibility. Whoever wins, the NST reports, will be handed the full AFC governance audit as the first item of business after the Congress.

What happens next

Three things. First, the AFC audit: the New Straits Times reported the full dossier would be handed to the new leadership immediately after the Congress, and Ghani has promised a response after the committee’s first meeting. Second, the MFL succession, which now doubles as the choice of FAM’s vice-president 2. Third, the football: the FIFA ASEAN Cup starts on 24 September, FIFA cleared Bergson da Silva, Brad Tapp and Manuel Hidalgo for Malaysia in the week of the election, and the new president has already named ASEAN dominance as the target.

We will update this page after the new committee’s first meeting and its response to the audit.