4 Riels World Soccer Championship

Cambodia issued this coin in 1989, four years before the Italia '90 World Cup it nominally celebrates — a scheduling quirk common among socialist-bloc numismatic issues of the period, where coins were produced well in advance and sold primarily through Western coin dealers as hard-currency earners rather than for domestic circulation. The National Bank of Cambodia had virtually no functioning retail banking infrastructure at the time, still rebuilding after the devastation of the Khmer Rouge years and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation.