Only Five Stayed: John Herdman, the FIFA ASEAN Cup and Garuda's Gamble on Renewal

There is a particular silence at Madya in the final days of August. The training ground sits inside the Gelora Bung Karno complex, a few hundred metres from SUGBK, and if you stand on the auxiliary stand and look down, you see the buses that bring the players in and take them away, steady as the breathing of a man trying to sleep. John Herdman stands at the centre of the pitch. He does not shout. He points, and the young players run in that direction.

I have spent most of my working life watching sessions like this. In Hamburg, in Madrid, in Rostov. And I have learned one thing: a training session does not lie about a man, but it promises nothing about a result. A team can train perfectly for seven days and collapse in fourteen seconds.

Fourteen seconds. That night in Rostov, I stood motionless for two minutes after the final whistle. Japan led Belgium two nil, then Jan Vertonghen scored with an overhead kick, then Marouane Fellaini headed in, then Nacer Chadli scored — all of it inside fourteen seconds, from a corner won by Japan themselves. I wrote in my notebook: "Collapse is also a love song." Since then I have understood that every short tournament is a race between memory and preparation.

The 2026 FIFA ASEAN Cup is such a short tournament. And Indonesia are entering it with an almost entirely new squad.

Then I read the squad list. Only around five names remain from the AFF Cup campaign. Five. In a squad that once made the whole of Southeast Asia remember its face.

Three matches. Seven days. One stadium. From 25 September 2026 to 1 October 2026, Indonesia will play Singapore, Bangladesh and Malaysia, all at Gelora Bung Karno. No travel. No unfamiliar hotels. Just the heat of Jakarta, the singing of tens of thousands, and an English coach who has just declared that this tournament is not like the other one.

Herdman said: "The FIFA ASEAN Cup is not the AFF Cup."

It is a short sentence. Behind it sits an entire architecture.

The man from Canada

John Herdman was born in 2026, fifty years old this year. He arrived in Indonesia after a career built in North American football — first with the Canada women's national team, then the men's team, where he led a generation to the 2026 World Cup after a thirty-six-year wait. This is a man who has worked in an environment where every detail is dissected, where a substitution can become a headline within twelve hours.

Fifty is an interesting age for a coach. Old enough to know you cannot teach everything again, young enough to still believe you can change a football culture. At that age, people tend to do one of two things: hold on to what has worked, or tear it down and rebuild. Herdman has chosen the second.

But before we discuss how he is building, we must discuss the ground he stands on.

Indonesia is a country of more than two hundred and seventy million people, and football there is almost a second religion. Every national team match is a national event, where defeat is not merely a loss of points but a loss of face, and where collective memory runs long like a river with no far bank. I have lived long enough in Europe to understand that not every football culture bears that pressure in the same way.

In Germany, people criticise with data. In Southeast Asia, people criticise with emotion. And because emotion has no spreadsheet, it never ends.

Herdman knows this. The proof is that he spent his first weeks not talking about tactics, but about definitions. He redefined the tournament. He redefined the squad. He redefined expectation.

That is the work of a manager, not merely of a coach.

A tournament with two names

We should begin with the name, because the name is where everything begins.

The AFF Cup — or ASEAN Championship — is the traditional tournament organised by the ASEAN Football Federation. It has history, it has memory, it has wet nights and surging stands. It is the tournament Southeast Asian fans grew up with.

The FIFA ASEAN Cup is something else. It carries the FIFA name — the global governing body — and that means far more than a label. It is a question of power. Whoever organises writes the rules. Whoever writes the rules decides who is released, who is retained, who is called.

In international football there is a thing called the FIFA international window — periods in which clubs are obliged to release players to national teams. If a tournament falls inside that window, a coach can call anyone. If it falls outside, everything becomes negotiation.

This is the most important variable that Herdman's remarks do not state. But it sits directly beneath the surface of the sentence "players who play abroad can strengthen Garuda".

If those players are released, Indonesia's squad becomes far deeper — physically, in pace, in European experience. If they are not, the promise of squad depth thins rapidly, and three matches in seven days becomes an ordeal rather than an opportunity.

I have seen a team live on a promise of depth, only to discover in March that it had fourteen fit players. Nobody wants that repeated.

There is a second layer of meaning here. FIFA's entry into a regional competition is a signal of expansion. For years, Southeast Asian football sat within the AFF's orbit, with a relatively closed commercial and media ecosystem. A FIFA-branded tournament could reposition that entire map — changing prestige, changing broadcast value, changing even the regional calendar over the long term.

That is why Herdman's sentence is not merely a sentence. It is a statement of position.

Three matches, seven days, one stadium

On 25 September 2026, Indonesia play Singapore. On 28 September 2026, they play Bangladesh. On 1 October 2026, they play Malaysia. All three at Gelora Bung Karno, Jakarta.

In European football, people speak of a "three-match week" as a nightmare. Here it is three matches in seven days — same venue, same pitch, same atmosphere. Logically, this means Indonesia remove the travel variable — the greatest enemy of Southeast Asian sides in regional tournaments.

But it also means every match is played in the same heat.

Jakarta in late September and early October sits in the transition between dry and wet season. Average humidity is very high. Afternoon temperatures can exceed thirty-two degrees Celsius. On the SUGBK pitch, under the floodlights, that is the equivalent of running a marathon inside a sauna.

I once stood in a commentary box in a place no cooler, and I remember that by the seventieth minute you no longer hear players shouting at each other. Only studs on grass, and breathing.

For a squad that is seventy per cent new, adapting to that heat is not a small detail. Players based in Europe will arrive from a completely different climate. Domestic players are used to it, but they have also come through a long domestic season. The physical question is not who is fitter, but who recovers faster within the seventy-two hours between matches.

That is why Herdman speaks of rotation. Not because he likes change. Because the calendar forces him to change.

And here is the point I want to stress: rotation is not a tactical philosophy, it is a consequence of the calendar. A coach can turn it into a philosophy, but first it is a physical constraint. Three matches in seven days in Jakarta do not allow anyone to keep the same eleven, unless that person wants his team to collapse in the third match.

Only five stayed

Now we come to the part that made me stop.

Around five players from the AFF Cup campaign remain in the squad for the FIFA ASEAN Cup. Five in a squad that usually numbers twenty-three to twenty-six. More than four fifths of the team has changed.

In the history of national teams, this is a rare scale of overhaul. Coaches usually keep a spine — the players who set the tempo, who carry tactical memory, who know how to speak to teammates when things break. Because tactical memory does not live in books; it lives in the legs of men who have run together.

When you change more than four fifths of a squad, you do not merely change personnel. You change how the team remembers.

There are two ways to read this.

The optimistic reading: Herdman is building a new team, better suited to his philosophy, drawing on overseas resources, unshackled from old habits. This is the thinking of an architect — you do not renovate an old house, you build a new one.

The pessimistic reading: five survivors means there is nobody left with enough standing to hold the rhythm in difficult minutes, nobody to remind a teammate that "we have been here before".

I lean slightly toward the second, not out of pessimism, but because I have seen too many new teams fall not for lack of talent, but for lack of shared memory.

In Rostov, what destroyed Japan was not a lack of technique. They had plenty. What destroyed them was that in those final fourteen seconds, nobody was clear-headed enough to shout "get back". A team built over years can still lose its memory in fourteen seconds. A team built in weeks is far more fragile than that.

The greatest risk for Indonesia is not talent. It is cohesion.

Birds from Europe

Herdman said that "players who play abroad can strengthen Garuda". That is the second most important sentence, after the one about the FIFA ASEAN Cup.

Indonesia has been going through a wave of players of Indonesian heritage competing in Europe — the diaspora route, the route of families who left the country decades ago and whose grandchildren now return with a passport. This is not unique to Indonesia. It is a trend across Southeast Asian football this decade: nations going to find resources where they once did not think they had any.

Sportingly, the meaning is clear. A defender raised in the Netherlands has a different physical base and reading of the game from a defender raised in a domestic league. A midfielder trained in Belgium has different decision-making habits. These differences do not make anyone better as a human being, but they give the team more tactical options.

Psychologically, the story is more complicated. Diaspora players carry two identities. They arrive at a team they may never have lived alongside. They must learn an anthem, learn to bear the pressure of a country they know only through family memory. And they must do it in a few weeks, mid-tournament.

I have seen squads with too many newcomers form small groups: the overseas bloc and the domestic bloc. This is not malicious division. It is human instinct — people gravitate to those like themselves. But in a dressing room, that instinct can become a crack, and the crack only shows when the team falls behind.

Herdman, with his experience in Canada — a country whose national team is always an assembly of several football cultures — probably understands this better than most. His decision to spend the first weeks talking about definitions rather than tactics is not evasion. It is preparation for a problem that data cannot measure.

And here is the point I want to state plainly, even if it is not popular: modern football is slowly turning players into assets and loyalty into contracts. When a diaspora player joins a national team, behind him there is usually a representation structure, a media strategy, a market valuation waiting to be updated. That does not make him bad. But it makes the story of identity more complicated than fans want to believe.

I say this in order to understand, not to doubt.

The doctrine of rotation

Herdman said the team will "adapt from match to match and rotate the squad". That is a management doctrine, not a tactical one.

The distinction matters. A tactical doctrine describes how you play: high or low press, build from the back or go direct, two holding midfielders or three. A management doctrine describes how you organise resources: who you use, when, for how long.

Herdman's remarks tell us about the second, and nothing about the first. We do not know Indonesia's shape. We do not know where they will press. We do not know how they will build. And so we cannot genuinely assess the tactical sophistication of this team.

That is a large gap. In modern football, a coach can talk about rotation and adaptation as much as he likes, but without a clear playing system, rotation becomes a polite way of saying you do not know what you want.

In fairness, there is a reasonable logic behind the strategy. Three matches in seven days, a new squad, opponents rated below them in the group: heavy rotation is an acceptable sporting risk. You want your key men fresh for the knockout rounds, if there are any. You want to give newcomers a chance to integrate. You want the dressing room to have enough people who feel part of the story.

It sounds very reasonable. But it is only reasonable if you win.

Draw with Singapore in the first match, and every rotation calculation becomes a headline. Lose to Malaysia, and every explanation about a different tournament becomes noise.

We will know the truth on 1 October 2026.

The memory of Bukit Jalil

Within Group A, one fixture carries a weight unlike the other two. Malaysia.

Southeast Asian football has a few rivalries that go beyond sport. Indonesia versus Malaysia is one of them. This is not just a fight for three points. It is a fight for memory.

I have spoken with fans of both nations, and what surprised me was not the bitterness but the precision. They remember every scoreline, every minute, every name. They remember matches played before many current players were born. It is a form of collective memory that European football usually finds only between nations with centuries of rivalry.

For Indonesia, beating Malaysia is not just three points. It is a confirmation of identity. And losing to Malaysia is not just dropping three points. It is a wound reopened.

Against that backdrop, Herdman's talk of rotation before matchday becomes a calculated gamble. If Indonesia beat Singapore and Bangladesh with rotated sides, then lose to Malaysia with their strongest eleven, everything breaks. If they win all three, the story becomes a new legend.

Between those two poles lies a wide grey zone, where anything can happen. And that is where a coach is truly tested.

The silence of applause

I want to tell a story not directly about Indonesia, but about how I read this one.

In May 2026, when the Bundesliga returned after sixty-three days of pandemic shutdown, I was assigned to commentate a match with no spectators. The Volksparkstadion was empty. No singing, no shouting, no applause. Only studs on grass and the breathing of players — sounds normally drowned out by the noise of tens of thousands.

After that match I could not sleep for three days. I wondered whether a game with no witnesses truly exists. Then I wrote: "A stadium without singing is where I hear the truth most clearly."

I tell this story because it helps me understand one thing about SUGBK.

Gelora Bung Karno holds tens of thousands, and when full it becomes a vast living body. It breathes, it sings, it trembles. For Indonesia, playing at SUGBK means playing before a creature that can lift you or swallow you.

But here is the other side: once you are used to singing, you no longer know how to hear yourself. A new team, without shared memory, is placed into the loudest environment of all — where tactical signals are drowned, where communication becomes harder, where every mistake is amplified many times over.

Home advantage is an advantage. But it is not an advantage for everyone. For a young team, home can be a harsher test than away.

Expectation built in advance

Now I want to address what I consider the most important and least discussed part of this story.

Herdman's sentence — that the FIFA ASEAN Cup is not the AFF Cup — is not merely an observation. It is a strategy.

Its structure carries three layers. Herdman tells us three things: this tournament is different, this squad is different, and therefore do not compare it with the old one. In the Southeast Asian media environment — where every tournament is compared with every tournament that came before — this is a defensive move before the first ball is kicked.

It works like this: if Indonesia win, Herdman is the man who built a new team successfully. If Indonesia draw or lose, it is because this tournament is different, this squad is new, we need time. In both cases, the explanatory frame is already built.

This is expectation management. And in football, expectation management is a serious professional skill, no less than tactical management.

I have seen this in many places. In Germany, coaches call it "building a perimeter". In Italy, people call it "creating white noise". In Southeast Asia, it usually takes the form of a sentence repeated often enough to become a truth.

And here the story has a second layer: a squad that is almost entirely new, keeping only five, is a squad where every failure can be explained by "not enough time". That is a very effective shield.

But it is also a double-edged sword.

When you say this tournament is different, you are also saying the standard of success is different. And when you say this squad is new, you are admitting you do not yet have a complete team. In a country whose collective memory runs like a river, those admissions will be remembered longer than you think.

Indonesian fans do not forget. They remember defeats from twenty years ago as if they happened last week. They will remember the phrase "this tournament is different" — and if results disappoint, they will remember it as a broken promise.

At sixty, I have learned that in football, memory is the one thing that is never rotated. You can change twenty players. You cannot change a memory.

The heat nobody measures

There is a technical detail I believe is underrated in this entire story.

Three matches in seven days in Jakarta is not only a physical challenge. It is a challenge to decision-making.

Under high temperature and high humidity, human cognitive capacity drops markedly. This is physiology, measured in many sports science studies. As the body dehydrates, the ability to process complex information falls, the ability to decide under pressure falls, and the tolerance for error falls.

In football, this means that by the seventieth minute of the third match, the players who normally think fastest begin to play half a second slower. That half second is the distance between a perfect pass and a conceded goal.

I once commentated a match where the pitch temperature exceeded forty degrees. I remember that by the second half, both teams played as if swimming. No tactic survives that heat — only habit does. Teams with shared habits survive. Teams without them drown.

And this is what makes Herdman's overhaul a bigger gamble than it looks: shared habit is exactly what a new squad lacks. Without shared habit, in the Jakarta heat, you have nothing to hold on to when your body begins to betray you.

I observe. I do not predict. And I will be very happy to be wrong.

The governance border

Back to FIFA and the AFF.

In international football, the right to organise a tournament is not merely an honour. It is the right to shape the rules, to distribute money, and to control the calendar.

A FIFA-branded tournament differs from an AFF-branded one on one fundamental point: FIFA has the power to impose a release obligation on clubs worldwide. The AFF does not hold that power to the same degree. This is why the overseas-player story in Herdman's remarks cannot be separated from the story of the organiser.

If the tournament falls inside a FIFA window, European clubs must release players. If not, everything becomes negotiation between federation, club and agent — a process whose outcome depends on each side's soft power.

This is why I say the most important variable of this tournament is not stated in any article. It sits in the FIFA calendar, in agreements between the Indonesian federation and European clubs, and in phone calls we never hear.

Over many years in this trade, I have learned that what is not said is often more important than what is said. A coach can talk about squad depth as much as he likes. But real squad depth is decided elsewhere — in Munich, in Amsterdam, in offices no camera ever visits.

And I want to add one thing about this governance dimension, however distant it seems from football: international football is increasingly becoming a system in which power concentrates at the centre, and regional federations grow ever more dependent on that centre. This means the prestige of traditional tournaments such as the AFF Cup can erode not through sporting quality, but through a shift in power. For a Southeast Asian fan, that is far more worth thinking about than any single win or loss.

Academies without teachers

At sixty, I have seen enough youth academies rise and fade to say something many do not want to hear.

Most academies opened by former stars are not training institutions. They are commercial stunts. The founder's name is the product, not the coaching programme. Children go there to take photos with an idol, not to learn how to move off the ball.

What does this have to do with Indonesia and the FIFA ASEAN Cup? A great deal.

The diaspora wave Herdman is harnessing is a short-term solution. It addresses the immediate problem — a squad short on depth and international experience — but it does not address the root problem: a systematically underfunded grassroots coaching pipeline.

A country can import players. A country cannot import a football culture. That culture is built by young coaches teaching nine-year-olds how to control a ball, how to look before receiving, how to lose without collapsing. In Germany, a coach of an under-nine team needs a formal coaching licence. In much of Southeast Asia, the person teaching nine-year-olds is often a volunteer parent.

That gap cannot be closed by a FIFA ASEAN Cup. It can only be closed by twenty years of patience.

What I would say to Herdman, given the chance, is this: diaspora players will win you a few matches. But for Indonesian football to win over twenty years, you need something else — a generation of grassroots coaches who are properly trained, properly paid, and respected as genuine teachers.

At sixty, I look back to understand how far I have come, but I keep reminding myself to look forward to know what I still lack. Southeast Asian football is the same. It has come a long way. It still lacks a great deal.

Players as assets

There is another dimension to this story I want to put on the table, even if it unsettles some.

In modern football, a player is not only a player. He is an asset. He has a representation contract, a media strategy, a market valuation tracked weekly. And when he pulls on a national shirt, behind him stands an entire machine.

This makes stories of patriotism more complicated. I am not saying players do not love their countries. I am saying that love does not exist in a vacuum. It exists alongside contracts, release clauses, image agreements.

I have seen players advised not to express political views because it could affect commercial value. I have seen players asked by their representatives not to discuss injuries because it could affect negotiations. And I have seen players choose silence because it is the safest option.

This is part of modern football that fans rarely see. And it directly affects how a national team operates.

When Herdman speaks of overseas players, he is speaking of a resource. But that resource is also a set of individuals with their own interests, their own pressures, their own agents watching every minute of playing time to negotiate the next contract.

That does not make them bad. It is football. But it means a modern national-team coach must be good not only at tactics, but at managing people inside a complex ecosystem.

A new dressing room

At the human level, this overhaul has a consequence rarely discussed: the formation of power groups.

In a national team, power does not come only from the armband. It comes from seniority, from caps, from relationships with the media, from whether you were present when the team struggled.

When you keep only five players, you erase almost the entire old power structure. This can be good — it allows a new culture to form without old habits blocking it. But it also means nobody has enough authority to say "quiet" when the dressing room starts to heat up.

Herdman, at fifty, with experience leading Canada through multiple cycles, is probably the right man to build a new structure. But a new structure needs time. And time is what three matches in seven days does not give you.

I remember a line from an old coach I once interviewed: "A team is not built in the meeting room. It is built on the buses." He was talking about dead time — travel hours, meals, hotel evenings — when people truly meet each other.

With all three matches at home, Indonesia will not have long bus journeys. Players will go home after each match, or stay in a hotel near the stadium. That means less time to build team connection than on a travelling campaign. It sounds small. But in football, small things decide.

Data and its shadow

One striking thing about this story is how little data it contains.

No xG. No PPDA. No possession figures. No conversion numbers. What we have are statements — claims about intent, about plans, about philosophy.

This does not make the story worthless. It simply means we are reading a story about management, not about tactics. And in modern football, the two are often confused.

I have worked in an industry where data increasingly dominates. In the Bundesliga, every club has an analysis department of dozens. Every match is recorded from hundreds of angles. Every pass is tagged.

And I have learned one thing: data is very useful, but it has a shadow. That shadow is everything data cannot measure — cohesion, fear, memory, the trust between two people in a thousandth of a second that decides.

Those fourteen seconds in Rostov were not predicted by any xG model. They happened because of a corner, a wrong decision, and a moment when an entire team forgot where it was.

Indonesia will enter the FIFA ASEAN Cup with a great deal of data on opponents and very little data on themselves. They have not played a single match together. They have no common denominator. And in that situation, the shadow of data will be larger than the data itself.

That cannot be solved by analysis. It can only be solved by time. And time is the one thing nobody in this race has.

Football never lies

Finally, public pressure.

I have commentated for forty-four years. I have seen coaches called geniuses on Saturday and idiots on Sunday. I have seen teams hailed as future champions after two wins and buried after a draw.

Public opinion does not measure truth. It measures collective emotion. And collective emotion is a beast that is never fed.

Indonesia will enter this tournament under the greatest pressure in the region. They play at home. They have a new squad. They have a foreign coach who has declared that this tournament is different. All of it combines into something that can explode in either direction.

If Indonesia beat Singapore in the first match — comfortably, beautifully — opinion will quickly turn to the story of a team that can win the title. If they win narrowly, opinion will turn to lingering problems. If they draw, opinion will turn to selection choices. If they lose, opinion will turn to something I do not wish to write.

This is why expectation management matters. Not because it changes results, but because it changes how results are remembered.

I once wrote: "Football never lies; only the spectator lies to himself." That is not a criticism of fans; it is an observation about human nature. We see what we want to see. We remember what we want to remember. And we forget that every match, however large, is only a collection of moments — and those moments are never complete.

Indonesia can win the title. Indonesia can go out in the group stage. Both are possible, and both can be explained by the same set of facts. That is the nature of short-form football.

Singing does not win matches, but it makes memory. And in Jakarta, across those days of September and October, memory will be written by tens of thousands of voices.

What remains

I want to close with a thought not about the tournament, but about what it leaves behind.

In Southeast Asian football we often speak of tournaments as destinations. They are not destinations. They are milestones on a much longer road.

The 2026 FIFA ASEAN Cup may be the moment Indonesia finds a new team. Or it may be the moment they discover they still lack the things money and talent cannot buy.

Whatever the result, one thing is certain: after this tournament, Herdman will have more answers and more new questions. That is how football works. It is never finished. It only moves forward.

At sixty, living in Hamburg, looking at Jakarta from twelve thousand kilometres away, I see something those closer may not: this overhaul is not an event. It is an experiment. And every experiment has value, even when it fails — because it tells us what does not work.

I have written that "every match is a life: some collapse, some rise, within a single breath". Three matches in seven days in Jakarta will be three breaths. And within each breath, a new team will learn something about itself.

What I want to know is not whether Indonesia win the title. What I want to know is whether, on 2 October 2026, when it is all over, those players still want to play together.

Because that — not the trophy — is the only thing that survives after the singing stops.