Bangladesh’s football has ridden a wave of hype since 2025, when Hamza Choudhury and Shamit Shome joined the national set-up. Bangladesh missed out on the Asian Cup, but the performances under that new spine promised more.
That promise has now reached its peak. Farhaan Ali Wahid, Shuki Itofusa and Zidane Yousuf all travel to Indonesia for their first major tournament in Bangladesh colours, and the expectation around the team has never been higher. Against Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, teams well above Bangladesh in the rankings, the question is whether that expectation matches what is possible in the FIFA ASEAN Cup.
Head coach Thomas Dooley has tried to answer that question directly and mostly by pushing back on it. He dismissed the social media reaction to Bangladesh’s recent results before the squad flew out.
“Some people on social media do not understand the reality of football,” he said. “Improvement does not happen overnight, and a coaching staff cannot transform a team instantly.”
The numbers back his caution. Indonesia sit 118th in the FIFA rankings, Malaysia 136th and Singapore 148th, while Bangladesh sit 181st. Dooley puts closing that gap at two to three years of work, not one tournament. “Expecting us to go out and easily beat these teams is unrealistic,” he said.
Preparation time makes the gap wider still. Dooley’s opponents have played four or five competitive matches in the past month and trained together for six to eight weeks. But most of Dooley’s local players went almost two months without team training after the San Marino friendly, leaving him four weeks to ready a squad that would normally need six.
“Match outcomes depend heavily on league strength, player development and preparation levels rather than effort alone,” he said, pointing to Indonesia’s six or seven players in Germany, the Netherlands and Italy as a gap effort cannot close.
Captain Jamal Bhuyan takes a more hopeful line than his coach, without denying the difficulty ahead. He points back to 2018, when Bangladesh shared a group with Uzbekistan, Thailand and Qatar in the same city and reached the Round of 16 that nobody expected them to reach.
“At that time, nobody believed we would make it to the next round,” he said. “But we did exactly that and qualified. Something similar could happen this time around as well.”
Former Bangladesh international Zahid Hasan Emily takes the middle path. He argues that Bangladesh have never played a tournament of this scale before, which explains the excitement, but that the excitement should not turn into pressure on the players.
His own targets read modestly next to the hype around the squad—beat Singapore, draw with Malaysia, and stay competitive against hosts Indonesia rather than suffer the kind of margin Bangladesh’s women conceded against North and South Korea at the Asian Games. “The matches will be competitive,” he said. “Anything beyond that would be a bonus.”
Fans sit somewhere between Jamal’s hope and Dooley’s caution. Content creator Imrose Hossain Chowdhury wants at least a win or a draw against Malaysia from Bangladesh’s best squad, even while accepting every other team in the group is stronger on paper. Deen Mohammad, who runs the Save Bangladesh Football community, sees Singapore as the more winnable fixture, with Malaysia the tougher test of whether this squad can hold a draw against a side ranked well above it.
None of that changes the numbers Dooley keeps returning to. Bangladesh’s rise since 2025 is real, and Hamza, Shamit and now Farhaan have genuinely raised the ceiling. But a 181st-ranked team facing three sides between 45 and 63 places above could never measure success in wins alone.
The honest target for this ASEAN Cup sits closer to Emily’s version than the headlines around Bangladesh’s new stars suggest—competitive matches, a push for third place in the group, and patience while the gap Dooley describes slowly closes.
