Persija vs Persib: When PSSI Places Crowd Safety Above Every Tactical Calculation

A rainy August night in Nha Trang. On October 1, 2026, I was sitting in a small studio, a match in Malang still ringing in my headphones, when my phone began to buzz without pause. People were dying at Kanjuruhan. Not on the pitch. Not because of a bad tackle. They were dying at the exits, in the corridors, in what should have been escape routes. More than one hundred and thirty-five of them. Among them, children not yet fifteen years old.

Four years later, on Saturday evening, in the east of Jakarta, Persija and Persib meet again. And the man at the head of Indonesian football, Erick Thohir, has to speak up a day before kick-off, in the voice of someone who knows history is waiting at the door.

Before the Persija–Persib derby in match week two of the 2026/27 Liga 1 season, PSSI chairman Erick Thohir publicly demanded that all parties — organisers, police, and supporter groups alike — place the safety of fans above every competitive calculation. He spoke at the Indonesia Sport Summit, and he invoked Kanjuruhan as a legal benchmark rather than a memory. Any act of violence or provocation, he said, would face criminal proceedings, and PSSI had agreed on this with the police.

On the security side, Bekasi district police have met representatives of the two biggest supporter groups in Indonesian football: The Jakmania of Persija and Viking of Persib. That is the single most important technical detail in this whole story, and I will come back to it.

What is Persija–Persib? Jakarta and Bandung. Two cultural regions, two identities, two ways of speaking Indonesian. The stands for this fixture are among the largest in Southeast Asia in any competition, and among the most volatile. In the collective memory of both terraces, the names of Bambang Pamungkas of Persija and Eka Ramdani of Persib still linger — names from an era when this derby was remembered for goals.

A larger context is worth recalling. After Kanjuruhan, PSSI had to go through a restructuring under pressure from FIFA and the AFC. Indonesia later hosted the FIFA U-17 World Cup in 2026, and the national team gradually rebuilt its image on the continental stage. Erick Thohir took over PSSI in 2026 and built his credibility on two pillars: governance reform and national team results. Saturday's Persija–Persib fixture therefore carries the weight of a test for the first pillar.

I have to say plainly something that sports media in the region usually avoids: a major derby in Southeast Asia is rarely staged with safety infrastructure proportionate to its scale. Kanjuruhan did not come from a bad-weather day. It was the product of a system: tickets sold beyond capacity, gates opening the wrong way, tear gas used in an enclosed space, and above all a host culture that believed repression equals control.

PSSI's move this time therefore carries a meaning I have not seen in Southeast Asian football in two decades: for the first time, a national federation in the region is saying publicly that terrace violence is a criminal matter, not a moral one.

That sounds self-evident, but it is not. In most leagues in the region, terrace violence is still handled with internal tools: fines for the home club, a few matches of supporter bans, or simply silence so the next fixture can fend for itself. Turning it into a legal matter is a step with long-term consequences, because it moves the point of accountability from an anonymous crowd to an individual with a name and an identity number.

Stadium safety is the accumulated result of years of relationship-building between organisers, police and supporter groups, not a single measure applied on matchday — and no warning can replace that work.

The detail of Bekasi police sitting down with The Jakmania and Viking therefore matters more than Erick Thohir's warning itself. It shows PSSI understands something many federations refuse to understand: in big stands, crowds are not controlled with fences. They are controlled through people who have a voice inside the crowd.

I have seen exactly this mechanism in Vietnam during the pandemic years. In March 2026, the V-League stopped indefinitely, Khanh Hoa FC faced dissolution after losing its sponsor, and I could not get to the 19/8 Stadium. The stadium stood empty, but I could still hear a million hearts breathing through the radio. I recorded a fifteen-minute commentary on the club's history from the days it was still called Khatoco Khanh Hoa and posted it online. Three days later, more than twelve thousand views. What I received were comments about fathers taking sons to matches, about a radio kept on the family altar, about torn ticket stubs still kept in wallets — not praise for my analysis.

The “Keep Nha Trang Green” campaign raised 380 million dong in two weeks. Not much next to a foreign player's contract. But it taught me that a supporter community, when invited to play the role of companion, does not need to be repressed into order.

The structural problem in Indonesia does not lie in the Persija–Persib fixture. It lies in the other two hundred and ninety matches of the season, in the rounds where no police chief sits down with a supporter group, no statement is issued, and no journalist stands waiting.

Economically, this story has a large scale. A fatal incident in Liga 1 would bring the risk of league suspension, stadium bans and, more importantly, the retreat of sponsorship money that is still trembling after the pandemic. Broadcast rights, commercial contracts and foreign investor confidence all hang on a question no ticket office can answer: will the crowd get home safely?

But this is exactly where I want to say the thing I think nobody wants to hear.

A warning issued the day before a match, however correct, is still a form of performance. It creates a paper trail of responsibility: if something happens, every party can say it spoke up in advance. It protects the institution. It does not necessarily protect people.

Indonesian football has a blind spot that Kanjuruhan itself exposed: people died at the exits. That is, in the place where every measure against violence — fences, tear gas, batons — is meaningless, even counterproductive. A promise to prosecute provocateurs does not solve the arithmetic of one exit too narrow for too many people. That is an engineering problem: counting people, designing flow, training stewards, controlling electronic tickets.

Notably, the message mentions no specific measure on stand segregation, ticket limits or alcohol control. They may already sit inside the plan and need no announcement. They may also be too weak to form the centrepiece of a message.

People remember goals, but I remember the moment two enemies embraced after the final whistle. Kanjuruhan will have its anniversary. But the names of those one hundred and thirty-five will fade, because collective memory tends to keep the symbol and let the humans drift. If four years on the only thing left is a quote from the head of a federation, then the lesson was never learned.

One more thing. Southeast Asian football is entering a phase where money flows in faster than governance capacity. Leagues expand, broadcast rights rise, but the number of people trained to run a match with forty thousand spectators grows far more slowly. That is the real gap. It does not sit in resolutions. It sits in specific people opening the gates at four in the afternoon.

Forty-four years chasing a ball, and in the end I realised I was running towards people. Saturday's Persija–Persib will have a winner, a loser, a goal repeated for a few days on social media. But what I truly want to know on Saturday night is banal: how many came in, and how many went home.

In an ordinary derby, the headline is the name of an attacking player. In this one, the headline is a security meeting.

If you have ever sat by a radio listening to a match you could not attend, write that memory in the comments. A football culture is only safe while its fans are still remembered as people with names.