‘We need to be focusing on the top players’: Dooley explains squad cuts

Bangladesh men’s football team head coach Thomas Dooley said he decided to trim the national team’s preliminary squad now to allow greater focus on the players most likely to travel to Indonesia for the FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026.

Dooley dropped six players from the camp on Thursday. The coach said the decision was necessary with only two-and-a-half weeks remaining before Bangladesh’s departure.

“We have only two more weeks or two and a half more weeks to prepare for Indonesia,” Dooley said in a video sent by the Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF). “If you have 34 or 32 players in the camp, you cannot really focus on the final 23.”

Bangladesh will leave for Indonesia on September 19 and begin their campaign against Malaysia on September 25. Singapore and Indonesia are also among their opponents in the tournament.

The American-German coach said reducing the group would allow his preferred players to receive the training time and workload needed to prepare for the tournament’s matches.

“We need to be focusing on the top players that we have, the ones that we select for Indonesia. Those players need the attention. Those players need to do the training exercises and the load that we need.”

Dooley also acknowledged the difficulty of telling players that they had not made the cut, saying those released had been given feedback on what they needed to improve before another opportunity with the national team.

“I told them what we thought about him, and I gave them some advice on what they should do for next time,” he said.

The coach pointed to midfield as an area where competition is particularly intense.

“We cannot take 10 players for Indonesia. So we have to select maybe the six top players that we have,” Dooley said.

He added that selection decisions would ultimately be based on training performances, with even small differences between players sometimes forcing difficult choices.

“Sometimes the gap between those players is minimal,” Dooley said. “Sometimes it’s just like we didn’t show anything the last four days and we have to make a decision now whether to go with A or with B.”