A Malaysian Heritage Prank and a Real FAM Letter: The Verification Gap in Southeast Asian Football

A Four-Year-Old Prank and a Real Letter

On an Instagram account called De Eerste De Beste, Sem Scheperman tells his story in the tone of a man who has grown used to being asked the same question. He is the captain of Heracles Almelo, a club playing in the top division of the Netherlands. He is 24 years old. And four years after a prank, his inbox still regularly fills with messages from Malaysia, asking whether he has any roots there.

The prank itself was almost absurdly simple. In a moment of joking, Scheperman let people believe he had Malaysian blood. The story escaped his control. Malaysian fans started messaging him. Then came an official letter from the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM), sent to his club.

A Dutch player receiving an invitation from a Southeast Asian federation, because of a joke. On the surface it reads like a novelty item. But behind it sits a far more serious story: how Southeast Asian federations are hunting for players, and how they verify — or fail to verify — before putting pen to paper.

I have watched matches in Asia and Europe for more than forty years. Having seen my hometown club relegated in 2026, I learned that the truth does not need embellishment. A letter sent because of a joke is a fact, and it deserves to be looked at squarely rather than laughed off.

Heracles Almelo and the Man Wearing the Armband

Heracles Almelo is a club in the city of Almelo, in the eastern Netherlands. It does not belong to the big-spending group in its league. For a club like that, having a 24-year-old captain is a notable signal: the coaching staff trusts a young player, places him at the centre of the dressing room, and hands him the responsibility of representing the club to the media.

That is why FAM's letter did not go to an anonymous name. It went to the captain of a club playing in the Dutch top flight. Administratively, the recipient was an organisation; in practice, the person pulled into the story was a 24-year-old footballer.

One thing must be stated clearly, and the original report does not state it: we do not know what position Scheperman plays, we do not know his minutes, we do not know his metrics. Any claim about his footballing quality at this point would be speculation. And for someone who has spent a career setting the rule of never writing without two independent sources, I choose not to speculate.

We know exactly three things: he is 24, he is the captain, and he plays in the Netherlands. Those three facts are enough to say he is a young player entering the strongest phase of his career. They are not enough to say anything about his level. Numbers tell part of the story; the rest lives in mud-stained boots. Here, we have not seen the boots.

Why a Federation Goes Looking in the Netherlands

Southeast Asian football has witnessed a quiet but fierce race in recent years: the race for players with native blood who grew up abroad. The technical term for them is diaspora players. Administratively, they are people who may be eligible to wear a national team shirt through ancestry, birthplace, or residence, under FIFA's eligibility rules.

Indonesia is the example most often cited. Over a few years, Indonesian football pushed hard to recruit players of Indonesian descent playing in Europe, and reaped results the professional world judged significant. That success did not rest on any single individual. It rested on the federation building a process: drawing up a list, making contact, verifying documents, then bringing players into the national team.

Malaysia looked at that and wanted the same. The Malaysia–Indonesia rivalry, already tense in the region, now has a new front. It is no longer only about boots on the pitch; it is about which federation finds more diaspora players, faster, and better.

When I worked as a resident reporter following a club in Busan, I learned something about races. They always begin with good decisions, then gradually slide into fast decisions. At first people pick the best. Later they pick the quickest. In the end they pick whoever can be announced soonest.

With diaspora recruitment, that trap is even clearer. Because no one owns the supply. No one holds a monopoly on players with Malaysian blood scattered across Europe. Anyone can search. Anyone can reach out. And when anyone can, speed becomes the only advantage — until it becomes the trap.

The Mechanism: How a Diaspora Player Is Verified

Let us talk about process, because this is the part least mentioned in the news.

For a player to wear the national team shirt of a country where he was not born, he must prove a nationality link. FIFA's rules generally require a genuine blood or nationality connection, provable with documents: birth certificates, passports, the papers of parents or grandparents. A statement on social media does not create eligibility. A message does not create eligibility. Not even a newspaper article does.

That means the real work of a federation wanting to recruit diaspora players lies in the dullest step: checking documents. Someone has to sit down, request originals, check dates, cross-reference civil registries, and answer the simplest question of all: is this person actually eligible?

There is a subtle point many overlook. A false claim about ancestry is not, under the rules, an offence. The real risk only appears when a club or federation attempts to register an ineligible player. In other words, the person joking is not the one who carries the greatest responsibility. The person signing the paper is.

Back when I followed a club in Busan, I kept my own statistics notebook. I recorded every misplaced pass, every dead-ball minute, every metre a player ran. People called me a man who argued with data; in truth I only trust what my eyes see on the pitch. The same goes for player files. A name on a list means nothing until documents stand behind it.

FAM sent a letter to Heracles Almelo. That is a formal act, consuming time and resources, and it shows a real recruitment process behind it, not a joke. But that process, at that moment, allowed a social media claim to travel further than it deserved to.

The Economics of a Hunt Without Transfer Fees

People often say recruiting diaspora players is the cheap route. No transfer fee. No negotiating with a parent club. No bidding war with big teams. On the face of it, a bargain.

But costs do not disappear. They move.

Instead of paying a club, a federation pays for an administrative machine: staff searching files, lawyers checking eligibility, travel costs to meet players and families, legal costs for citizenship procedures. And above all, the opportunity cost: the time a group of people spends on a file that may lead nowhere.

When a letter is sent on the basis of unverified information, that entire cost chain is triggered before any guarantee exists. At the scale of a single file, the spend is small. But if this story repeats — and with social media's reach, it easily can — it becomes a recurring cost that creates no value.

There is another market dimension worth noting. If several federations in the region push hard into diaspora recruiting, the value of genuinely eligible players rises. The supply of such players is limited. When demand rises and supply does not, prices climb — not transfer prices, but the terms negotiated in personal contracts and image rights. This is a market most fans never see, yet it operates for real.

The Contrarian View: The Problem Is the Filter, Not the Player

The easiest way to tell this story is to make Scheperman the protagonist: the serial joker, the man messaged by an entire nation, the accidental celebrity. But the true protagonist of this story is not him.

Scheperman never declared himself Malaysian. He made clear that the story about Malaysian ancestry was completely untrue, and that he had let it go too far. FAM is said to know his real status. So no one was defrauded in the legal sense. No sanction was issued. No player was wrongly registered.

The real point lies elsewhere. A national federation spent resources on formal contact based on unverified information. If this time it was a joke, next time it could be a deliberate lie. And if a federation responds to every social media signal the same way, it will soon spend its time chasing shadows.

There is something I want to say plainly, even if it unsettles some people. Public pressure is a legitimate motive for a federation to act. But public pressure is not evidence. The fact that thousands of people believe something does not make it true. An organisation charged with running a nation's football has a duty to tell the two apart.

The ball does not lie, but the hand holding the pen can. And the hand holding the pen here is not only the journalist's. It is also the person drafting the letter, the person signing it, the person deciding that an unverified signal is enough to open a file.

When Fans Become Scouts

The messages Scheperman has received over four years did not come from any organisation. They came from individuals, scattered, persistent. They cast themselves as scouts. They read information, they doubted, they asked. To some degree this is a spontaneous player-hunting network, and it moves faster than any official department.

That network has the strength of a crowd, but it lacks the discipline of a verification process. It pushes information out first and lets others clean up later. In this case, the cleaner was the player himself, who had to repeat one answer for four years.

The persistence of Malaysian fans says something about football there: they badly want to believe their national team can improve quickly. When expectations rise, the public's threshold for verification drops. People are willing to believe first and check later.

This is fertile ground for future misunderstandings. If another player — real or fake — appears with an ancestry claim, the reaction will look much the same. And if the federation reacts the same way, the loop repeats.

What Remains After a Letter

A prank lasting four years is an unusually long prank. It lasted not because it was funny, but because it touched something very hot in Southeast Asian football: the desire for more good players, through every lawful route.

That desire is legitimate. But legitimate does not mean exempt from checking. A federation in a hurry should remember that speed only has value when paired with accuracy. Go fast and get it wrong, and you will have to come back — and coming back always costs more.

Southeast Asian football is at the stage of learning to work with files. Indonesia went first and left a lesson in organisation. Malaysia is following. Cases like Scheperman will keep appearing, because the more people know the diaspora route exists, the more claims — true and false — will be made.

News can wait, but the truth can never be postponed. With a letter sent to the wrong person, the price is not great. But how a federation handles today's misdirected letter will decide whether it sends another one tomorrow.

Three signals I will be watching. Whether FAM publishes a clear verification process for diaspora files. Whether the recruitment race between Malaysia and Indonesia produces more cases like this one. And whether fans keep acting as spontaneous scouts, so that federations learn to filter information from that channel.

The question I leave behind is not for Scheperman. He has told his story, and it is closed. The question is for the people sitting in the records room: before signing an invitation letter, who checked the birth certificate?