Timor-Leste

Bronze at the 2023 SEA Games in Cambodia stands as the high point for football in Timor-Leste, and it came from a squad built mostly of players under 23. Nothing at senior level has matched it: four appearances in the ASEAN Championship finals — 2004, 2018, 2020 and 2024 — have all ended in the group stage.

The first win of any kind took a decade to arrive. On 5 October 2012, in Yangon, Timor-Leste beat Cambodia 5–1 in qualifying for that year's regional championship, with Murilo de Almeida, a Brazilian-born striker who had taken citizenship, scoring twice. Emerson Alcântara was in charge, and he took the team on to the finals. Almeida's origins later became part of a far larger problem.

In October 2021 the Asian Football Confederation's disciplinary committee found that the Federação de Futebol de Timor-Leste had registered twelve Brazilian-born players using forged birth and baptismal certificates. Nine of them played in 29 continental matches between 2011 and 2016; all 29 were struck out and recorded as 3–0 defeats. The federation was fined USD 20,000 and shut out of qualifying for the 2023 Asian Cup. Its general secretary, Amandio de Araujo Sarmento, was banned from football for three years.

What survives from that period is thin. Ramon Saro's stoppage-time equaliser against Malaysia in 2015 brought the country its first point in World Cup qualification. In September 2024, João Pedro scored three against Mongolia in a 4–1 win — the first hat-trick anyone had managed for Timor-Leste.

The national stadium in Dili holds 5,000 and has repeatedly fallen short of the standards required for competitive fixtures, sending "home" matches to Indonesia, Thailand and Taiwan. Playing in Indonesia carries its own weight, given the occupation that ended in 1999.

The highest the team has stood in the FIFA rankings is 146th, in June 2015.