Macao’s football coach Lázaro Oliveira, whose contract with the squad ends this month, said the SAR had fallen “to the bottom of Asian football” after the Covid-19 pandemic. He made the comment after the team was eliminated last night from the qualifiers of the 2027 Asian Cup.
Following a 0-1 defeat at home to Brunei, Oliveira told the Portuguese news agency Lusa that the team “has to play more often” if it is to improve. In the past year, the SAR’s men’s team has only had three fixtures – against Bhutan, Cambodia and Myanmar, all of which it lost.
The home team was hampered by FIFA’s decision at the end of August to ban foreign passport holders from team, meaning that Portuguese-South African captain Nicholas Torrão, Benfica graduate and former youth international for Portugal Filipe Duarte, defender Vítor Almeida, and forward Iuri Kaewchang Capelo were unable to play.
[See more: FIFA says foreign nationals can’t play football for the Macao team]
However, Oliveira told Lusa that the exclusion made room for younger local players. “They are the future of Macao, but to raise the competitive level, they need to compete, to gain experience,” he said.
Meanwhile, the coach is pondering his next move, with the imminent end of his contact with the Macau Football Association. “We need to have better conditions. If the goal is to continue playing a few games every now and then, I will have to think about the future,” Oliveira told reporters at a post-match press conference.
The defeat suffered last night by the men’s squad comes in the wake of a 9-0 thrashing inflicted on Macao’s women’s team by Singapore in May.
