Four Years After Kanjuruhan: FIFA's Safety Pledge and an Unanswered Question

On the night of October 1, 2026, the final whistle of the Arema FC versus Persebaya Surabaya match at Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, East Java, sounded over the home side's 2-3 defeat. Thousands of Arema supporters flooded onto the touchline. Security forces responded with tear gas. In a space enclosed on all four sides, the crowd funnelled toward exit gates that were far too narrow. 135 people never made it home. Hundreds were injured. Exactly four years later, on October 1, 2026, FIFA President Gianni Infantino issued a message of condolence and pledged to work with the Indonesian Football Association (PSSI) to build "safer football." People call stories like Kanjuruhan the margins of football. I call them where the real stories are hidden. It must be said plainly from the start: this is not a tactical story. No formation, no pressing phase, no individual error on the pitch killed 135 people. Kanjuruhan was a failure of match operations and crowd-safety engineering. Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) concluded there were two categories of violation: excessive use of force and failures in match-safety governance. Mechanically, this is a textbook crush — a localised trigger event inside a space with insufficient egress capacity and no decompression zone. In other words, it was a stadium-design and operational failure, not a failure of the people who came to watch football. The wider context needs to be placed correctly. Kanjuruhan happened in Liga 1, Indonesia's top flight, in an East Java derby between two clubs with a tense head-to-head history. The emotional heat of the fixture is a variable in crowd management, not an excuse for exempting responsibility. For four years, public pressure on PSSI and its chairman Erick Thohir has not eased; it simply resurfaces on a cycle, crashing down again every October 1. And as Indonesia's national team raises its regional standing, the reputational cost of this disaster rises with it, because the brighter the spotlight, the more closely the same actors are examined. Across 18 years of following regional football, I have stood in Southeast Asian stands where there was only one exit, where organisers had no plan beyond calling in more police. Kanjuruhan was not an unavoidable accident. It was the outcome of a chain of decisions that could have been predicted. The crux of Infantino's message is that it ties safety to the transformation agenda. FIFA pledged to work with PSSI, with chairman Erick Thohir and with the Indonesian government; safety is framed as a pillar of the transformation journey, alongside FIFA Forward development programmes in infrastructure, grassroots football and player development. That is not an empty promise, but neither is it a commitment that can be verified immediately. The phrase "continue the transformation" itself says the work is unfinished. Policy does not change from a desk; it changes from voices that refuse to stay silent. There is a paradox that must be named correctly. Indonesian football currently carries its highest commercial value and media pull in decades: the national team goes deeper in continental competition, the domestic league draws bigger crowds, hosting ambitions are clearer. But sporting value and spectator safety do not automatically travel with commercial value. A stadium can sell out and still lack enough exit gates. A league brand can grow revenue and still lack mandatory safety certification. If the commercial side runs faster than the safety infrastructure, that gap is exactly where catastrophe returns. And this is the biggest blind spot: four years on, the accountability loop is still not closed. The persistence of a fixed commemoration day is itself a soft indicator that key remedial steps — compensation, investigative conclusions, egress retrofits, reform of the use-of-force doctrine — remain unfinished. People hold commemorations when the story has no ending, not when it has been resolved. A few facts should be tracked in numbers, not promises. Stadium safety certification: does it exist, and who issues it. Capacity and exit-gate counts at major venues: are they publicly disclosed. The doctrine on using tear gas inside stadiums: has it been fully banned. FIFA Forward programmes: how much is actually budgeted for safety infrastructure against total commitments. The next Komnas HAM report: does it exist, and does it lead to concrete legal action. I write about people who have no place in the standings, but whose names belong in history. The 135 at Kanjuruhan are not statistics. They were spectators who came to watch a football match and never returned. Four years on, the only meaningful measure of the promise of "safer football" is not the condolence message, but how many exit gates have been opened, how many stadiums certified, and how many victims' families have received a satisfactory answer. When the training ground is empty, their voices carry further than ever. The question is whether anyone is listening — or merely waiting for October 1 next year.