Cambodia

Cambodia's men's side spent the 2022 World Cup cycle doing something it had never managed before: winning a qualifying tie. Pakistan went out in the first round, and the second brought Iran, Iraq and Bahrain. The team finished bottom of that group, though they beat Afghanistan 1-0 along the way. The heaviest defeat of the run came in 2019, when Iran put fourteen past them.

The federation dates from 1933 and joined FIFA and the AFC in 1954. A first official match followed two years later in Kuala Lumpur, a 2-9 loss to Malaya.

Everything before and after is measured against 1972. Playing as the Khmer Republic, the team beat Kuwait 4-0 and reached the semi-finals of the Asian Cup. Nothing since has come close: at every other AFC tournament the group stage has been the end of it, and in the ASEAN Championship, entered regularly since 1996, Cambodia have never got out of the group either.

The 1993 return to international football came after the Khmer Rouge years, with the 1996 ASEAN tournament the first competition back.

Home is the National Olympic Stadium in Phnom Penh, holding 30,000 since its 2023 refit; the bigger fixtures move to the Morodok Techo National Stadium and its 60,000 seats. The shirt is blue, the shorts dark blue or black.

Keisuke Honda took the job in 2018 as head coach and general manager at once, and worked without pay until he left in 2023. Hok Sochetra remains the record scorer with 20 goals between 1995 and 2003; Chan Vathanaka became the first Cambodian to play professionally abroad, in Japan and Malaysia.