Melbourne Victory marquee Keisuke Honda has been named as the new General Manager of the Cambodian national team.
Honda fronted a press conference held by the Football Federation of Cambodia on Sunday to confirm the surprising news.

It comes just a week after the 32-year-old became Victory’s new marquee recruit for the Hyundai A-League 2018/19 Season.
Cambodia is playing in the 2018 AFF Suzuki Cup tournament in November but it remains unclear if Honda will be at the helm, with the Hyundai A-League season already underway at that time.
The Cambodian’s are in the same group as Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos for the event, which runs from November 8 to December 15.
It will be interesting to see how Honda will mix his responsibilities with Cambodia to his playing duties with Victory.
https://www.a-league.com.au/news/victorys-honda-lands-new-job-cambodian-national-team

Playing in one league, just finished international career for his home nation and general manager of the national team for a third nation...  I know the article says he will be doing this via video conference once a week but this sounds really wacky to me.  Has this ever happened before?

A man of many talents and goals in life, good on him. 

Now wouldn't this be much more interesting if Australia was involved in the South East Asian Championship as well?

When he's finishing cleaning the change rooms

Constantly disappointed by our lack of engagement with the AFF.

I'm not. I have no idea why anyone would want to watch us play Cambodia, Burma and Laos. Pretty damn ridiculous. It's about as mickey mouse a tournament as you can get. Perhaps on the same level as that east asian cup that we took part in once. It served no purpose whatsoever and we got nothing out of it. 

Yes. I remember those EAFF qualifying games.  Totally useless.

Only gave first caps to Mooy, Rogic, Behich, Ryan, Franjic, Antonis and Taggart.  All playing in the A League.

Complete waste of time . . . 

WTF is this serious  ? can't be  ..

Edit : well f...k me... it is real ..what a joke ?
Since when does a player sign on to play for a team whilst managing a national team team at the same time ?
If you thought Bolt was a circus ...what is this guy ?
Can you in imagine when he went  to AC Milan him saying "oh and by the way ...I want to manage a National  side as well ..I assume that is OK  ?"
.....and Victory obviously said yes !!!!!
How to demean a league ....absolute joke !!!

melbourne circus fc

He isn't the manager, essentially a consultant from afar.

Harry Redknapp style

I remember that as well. Our c team beating Guam 8-0 and Taiwan 9-1. It was boring af. I thought we got away from Oceania to avoid minnow tournaments like that. We may as well have played a couple of friendlies against Vanuatu for all the good it did us. 

Honestly it surprises me how bad the South East Asian teams are. There is genuinely a lot of support in these nations but they struggle to even get a somewhat competitive team out. Apparently Vietnam are on the verge of a golden generation and Thailand seem to be getting decent so it'll be interesting to see if they can keep improving. 

part of the deal with will smith and their company

These two sides are definitely on the improve - East and SE Asia will continue to usurp the Middle East in terms of playing strength if things progress as they are.

What so someone sends him a list of team names & possible formations & he just emails back yay or nay. 

I could do that job.   

Bit of a beat up the whole story imo. Honda is doing a full pre season and people are seriously questioning his commitment. How many high profile stars arrive here this early to do pre season? 

No doubt its just a token sort of role with little genuine involvement but its still not a very good look.

yeah pretty much this.

It's just weird as well tbh.

The man has shown himself to be ambitious with many projects both inside and outside of football. Just look at the man's twitter handle.

As long as it doesn't impact his playing commitment to the club (and I can't see how it would) then I think it's great.

Then you remember incorrectly, as that was the qualifiers for the tournament, in which we only got past Hong Kong 1-0, and drew 1-1 with North Korea meaning we only qualified on goal difference. The finals were against Japan, South Korea and China. Good teams.

You were also selective with "Cambodia, Burma and Laos" as competitors in the South East Asian Championship, when you know full well that it also includes Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam, growing countries seriously interested in and investing in football, and unlike our home 2015 Asian Cup in which 11 of the 16 teams involved were from Central and West Asia (who can forget Oman v Kuwait, Qatar v Bahrain, Uzbekistan v Saudi, or Palestine v Jordan?) a South East Asian Championship would include countries that Bazza and Shazza could actually find on a map, and that we've got sizable numbers from in our community, so could arguably be a bigger draw.

Perhaps we'd only play a domestic or non-Euro first choice squad, but Lightbulb's post regarding the 2013 East Asian Championship amply proves how useful that would be.

Oh yeah, he seems to be very motivated outside playing and goal driven. I am not against it, it's just odd. 

However, there are concerns he is in breach of Asian Football Confederation statutes relating to a conflict of interest.

Article 3 states: “Any person receiving numeration by virtue of a contract from a member association or any of its clubs shall not be entitled to accept work in return for renumeration with another member association at the same time.”

It is understood Victory were aware of the Honda deal with Cambodia, which is why his contract took a little longer to confirm.

Invite the Cambodian National Team to Melbourne & they can play the Victory youth team as much as they want & Honda doesn't have to go anywhere to do his job.