Thailand has never qualified for a FIFA World Cup, and the fans here have made their peace with this in the most pragmatic way available: by adopting someone else's team and following it with the kind of devotion that qualified nations' supporters spend a lifetime building.
The Premier League has been a weekly religion in Bangkok for decades, and when the World Cup comes around, the allegiances are clear even if the flag on the shirt belongs to a country the fan has never visited.
Argentina, Brazil, England, France: the Thai football public distributes itself across these loyalties with genuine feeling, and the World Cup, every four years, is the moment those feelings are supposed to find their fullest expression.
