It is hard to say if the country had a better experience than Australia, who went all the way with just a single sympathy vote to show for it.
Either way, neither country will have happy memories of that time but it can only help .
Closer cooperation on the football field between Australia and Indonesia can only be positive for all manner of reasons. It will be especially fascinating to have a bid from countries with such different cultures.
While a joint bid is a great idea -- I wrote an article back in 2009 suggesting this happen for the tournament in 2022 when it was clear that the two countries complemented each other’s strengths and weaknesses -- there are a few things Australia need to keep in mind in mind.
FFA may be about to get a sustained and in-depth lesson on how its Indonesian counterpart works.
The Football Association of Indonesia, commonly called the PSSI, has been a law unto itself in the past.
It was ten years ago when I visited their offices to talk about their bid for 2022. CEO Nurdin Halid didn’t want to meet a foreign journalist who may ask questions about his twin prison sentences handed out on corruption charges.
So, after walking down the stuffy winding corridors underneath the cavernous Gelora Bung Karno Stadium in Jakarta, I sat drinking green tea in a brown office with General Secretary Nugraha Besoes.
He discussed the dream of bringing football’s biggest event to Southeast Asia’s biggest country. The dream sounded nice but soon ended as the country woke up to the fact it wasn’t going to happen in the absence of government support and public trust in the scandal-ridden federation.
A book could be written about Nurdin and his exploits before he was finally forced to step down by FIFA, the organisation was negligent in turning a blind eye in 2011 to all that had gone on over the years.
Just as much could be said about the period since then. Suffice to say that the FIFA suspension that came in 2015 was hardly a surprise. The ban was lifted a year later but issues remain.
Only in January, Edy Rahmayadi resigned as head of the federation after a match-fixing scandal. Edy was already a controversial figure and a high-ranking military officer while still performing his PSSI role.
In fact he only resigned from the armed forces in January 2018 to stand for elections to be governor of North Sumatra. That bid was successful and he saw no issues with combining both roles though fans in the country did.
The current boss Erick Thohir is a former owner of Inter Milan and a well-known figure. This can-do billionaire businessman has been hailed as a new broom in the murky world of Indonesian football but this has been heard before and here is another PSSI boss with deep political ties.
Thohir may be easier for FFA to deal with compared to some of his predecessors but the Australians need to enter into negotiations with eyes firmly open. Politics and football are entwined in Indonesia to an extent that is unimaginable Down Under.
This can lead to frustration for outside forces looking to get involved with Indonesian football. There is a constant danger of political considerations outranking football when decisions are made and that may well prove to be difficult for FFA.
There is also the potential issue with Southeast Asia.
Just days after the , it turns out that the biggest country in Southeast Asia with over a third of its population has been talking to Australia about going in a different direction.
Officials in the region are stressing that these are very early days but a rival bid will not go down well.
Yet whatever happens, getting together with Indonesia to discuss a joint World Cup bid is a great idea as are closer ties regardless of what happens with that tournament.
However, PSSI has been one of the most dysfunctional federations in world football for a very long time. FFA have to go into this with eyes wide open as this could be quite a ride.
