Four Years After Kanjuruhan: Infantino's Pledge and an Unclosed Circle of Accountability

On October 1, 2026, the social media account of FIFA President Gianni Infantino posted a message of condolence directed at Malang, East Java. He pledged to keep standing alongside Indonesian football on its journey towards a safer game. Four years earlier, on the very same date, 135 people never got the chance to go home after the match between Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya at Kanjuruhan Stadium.

I read that post several times. Between the two whistles there is a world the scoreboard cannot measure. That world was not in the 2-3 scoreline in Persebaya's favour, nor in the Liga 1 table that season. It was at the exit gate.

Context: a night with no extra time

Kanjuruhan is Arema FC's home ground, located in Malang Regency, East Java. The match on October 1, 2026 was a meeting between Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya, the two clubs with one of the longest-running rivalries in Indonesian football. People call it the Derby Jatim. For the people of East Java, this was never simply three points.

Arema lost 2-3. When the final whistle blew, part of the crowd spilled onto the pitch. To control the situation, security forces deployed tear gas inside the stands and at the exits. In a semi-enclosed space, tear gas does not make people disperse; it makes them run towards the doors. Thousands funnelled into a handful of narrow gates at once.

The result: 135 dead, hundreds injured. It stands among the worst stadium disasters world football has seen in decades.

Later, Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) published its investigation findings, identifying two categories of violation: excessive use of force and a failure of match-safety governance. That wording matters. Komnas HAM did not call this an incident. It called it a human-rights violation.

What the scoreboard cannot measure

Nearly forty years of writing have taught me one habit: noting the details nobody else notices. In 2026, following Long An FC in the AFC Cup, I sat through all nine home matches and wrote down a number no newspaper mentioned: three goals conceded inside the final ten minutes. Three times, the same window. Not coincidence, but a signal.

Kanjuruhan had its own final-ten-minute moments, only on a far larger scale. The mechanism behind the disaster is not complicated: a localised trigger event, in a space without sufficient egress capacity, and with no decompression zone. When the crowd is compressed at the gate, what kills is not stampeding in the ordinary sense, but compressive asphyxia, when the chest is squeezed so hard it cannot draw breath.

This is the crux most people still get wrong. Kanjuruhan is routinely labelled fan hooliganism. But if it had been a riot, the casualties would have been scattered across the stands, in the fighting. In fact, the deaths were concentrated at the exit gates. That points to design failure and operational failure.

Put plainly, the root cause lies in the chain of decisions behind the stands, not in the crowd itself — from egress design, to the competence of the stewarding force, to the doctrine on use of force and the command authority on matchday.

The pledge and its limits

Four years on, the picture has gained a few new lines. FIFA and the Indonesian Football Association (PSSI) under chairman Erick Thohir maintain cooperation across several areas: infrastructure, grassroots football, player development. Money from the FIFA Forward programme flows into Indonesia as a long-term development channel. Infantino has repeatedly said safety is an important part of Indonesian football's transformation journey, and pledged to work with PSSI and the government.

Those are positive signals and deserve to be recognised. But one word is worth pausing on: "continue", in "continue the transformation journey". The word itself concedes that the process is not finished.

And here is where I want to speak plainly. FIFA can pour money into infrastructure, impose stadium certification standards, send experts to train organising committees. But the deadliest variable on the night of October 1, 2026 — the decision to deploy tear gas in an enclosed space — does not sit in FIFA's rulebook. It sits in the operational regulations of the security forces, a domain of national sovereignty.

In other words, the promise of a safe football environment can only be half-delivered by football itself. The other half must come from reform of use-of-force doctrine and security oversight. Without that half, every stadium certificate is just paper.

There is one more thing about October 1. Four years on, the victims' families are still speaking out. Questions about criminal accountability, about compensation, about the pace of reform still have no complete answer. The annual commemoration is not only an act of remembrance. It is also an indicator. When a community still has to repeat its grief once a year, the circle of accountability has not closed.

Breathing in an empty stadium

In 2026, when the pandemic shut every stand, I made a podcast series called Breathing in an Empty Stadium. Episode twelve featured a mother from Da Nang who called in. Her son died in a traffic accident in 2026, on his way to watch SHB Da Nang play. She cried for the first fifteen minutes, then talked about the scarf her son left behind. It is still folded away in a drawer.

I tell this story for a very specific reason. Behind every player who walks onto the pitch, there is a mother who never walks onto it. At Kanjuruhan, 135 people went to watch football and never came home. That means 135 families who, every time a season kicks off, have to live through that October 1 all over again.

Football never owes us a result, it only owes us a story. But to those 135 families, football owes something else, much larger: a full explanation and a system that will not let the same thing happen again.

I have sat in many V.League stands. I have seen crowds pour out of stadium gates after the final whistle, squeezing through narrow walkways, with iron fencing and parked motorbikes on both sides. No disaster has happened yet. But "has not happened yet" and "safe" are two different concepts, and the distance between them is sometimes one wrong decision by the commander on the ground.

What to watch next

Four years is long enough for an event to become a memory, and short enough for it to remain an open file. What is worth tracking is not the social media posts, but three very concrete things: the list of stadiums certified as safe along with the certification criteria, whether the doctrine on use of force inside stadiums has been revised, and the progress of compensation payments to the victims' families.

If those three have clear answers, Infantino's pledge will have somewhere to stand. If not, next October 1 will be another day of counting.

And the question I leave for myself, as for anyone working in football: if a ticket into a stadium can still be a one-way ticket, what exactly are we selling to the spectators?