Four Years After Kanjuruhan: Infantino's Condolence, a Safety Promise and an Unpaid Ledger

For four years, one habit has stayed with me: I read the paperwork before the match more closely than the match report after it. Who plays whom, how many police will be deployed at a high-rivalry fixture, which stadium gates stay open, and who signs off on that decision — these questions matter to me more than the scoreline. On 1 October 2026, the fourth anniversary of the Kanjuruhan disaster, FIFA President Gianni Infantino's condolence message surfaced. Reading it, I felt I was holding a ledger of football's safety accounting — and on one page the ink has still not dried. The run begins where the broadcast camera looks away; this disaster happened just outside the camera's frame, at the mouth of an exit gate. The core facts deserve restating. On 1 October 2026, Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, East Java, hosted a Liga 1 match between Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya — one of Indonesian football's most volatile derbies, the 'Derby Jatim', the East Java rivalry. After the final whistle, fans entered the pitch, police fired tear gas, and 135 people died in a crush at narrow exit gates. Indonesia's National Human Rights Commission, Komnas HAM, investigated and concluded that human rights were violated, that excessive force was used, and that match-safety governance itself had collapsed. Four years on, that wound has not healed in the memory of Indonesian football's public. I did not watch this match myself. To write about Kanjuruhan I had to return to the kind of spreadsheet where every layer of stadium safety sits in its own column: crowd capacity, number of gates, police-to-spectator ratio, the list of prohibited items. In 2026, working behind the scenes for UE Cornellà's Juvenil A, the spreadsheet I kept tracked teenagers' minutes and sleep notes. Kanjuruhan taught me that the same silent accounting must run over stadium safety. U19s in a silent spreadsheet are still breathing; so is a stadium, until the day it turns into a death trap — and nobody notices in advance. Now to the analysis. Infantino's message rests on two things: grief, and safety as part of a 'transformation journey'. He promised to make Indonesian football safe, and named PSSI chairman Erick Thohir and the Indonesian government as partners. The FIFA–PSSI–government triangle is the real story here. That structure signals cooperation while creating a governance-blurring risk: the boundary between association independence and state involvement is not clear. Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya appear only as fixture participants; no table, tier or ranking analysis is possible here. There is a second signal from FIFA's side — investment in Indonesian football through FIFA Forward and other programmes. FIFA Forward is FIFA's development-funding mechanism for member associations, directed at infrastructure, grassroots and player development. Note that such funding is typically tranche-based and audit-linked, carrying a compliance layer behind it. Yet Infantino's message contains no figures, no tranche size, no milestones. The 'commitment' it creates is directionally positive for the system, but unverifiable. The funding talk also does reputational work — tying capital flows to safety reform. And here is my second reading. Infantino's message is a pressure-management act. Acknowledging grief while redirecting attention toward 'transformation' and 'a safer future' is not dodging responsibility; it is spreading responsibility across time. The question is what happened after Komnas HAM's human-rights finding. This article names no sanctions, no prosecutions, no clear compensation outcome. That accountability gap is the biggest risk of all. On safety, the pivotal compliance issue is tear gas. International stadium-safety norms sharply restrict the use of tear gas inside or around stadiums. Kanjuruhan is exactly that case — and it is a recognised governance trigger. When Infantino says safety is an important part of the transformation, FIFA's conditional oversight effectively hangs over Indonesian football. Here is my contrarian angle. Everyone expects FIFA and PSSI to deliver safer football. I do not believe Infantino's condolence message is itself a reform. Anniversary-driven messages often rest on emotion rather than evidence. The hype-to-kill risk is inverted here: rather than a rising star's backlash, the risk is 'promise to non-delivery'. If reform stalls, the same message flips into a recurring indictment of FIFA and PSSI. My deepest doubt concerns sourcing. The quotes are well sourced; the death toll and Komnas HAM data are sourced. But several claims — the infrastructure and grassroots programme details, the fixture context — are unsourced. So this mainstream report is reliable where it quotes, but its surrounding framing needs caution. My job as a football writer sits exactly here: hunting for what was left unsaid rather than what was said. A long-term picture of the effect on Indonesia's football ecosystem is possible. On one side, FIFA Forward money flows into infrastructure, grassroots and player development — upstream investment. On the other, safety reform is the conduit through which that investment can become a credible football product. If safety stays unresolved, broadcasters and commercial partners may attach image clauses to Indonesian football assets — nobody says it aloud, but the logic holds. I watched Gavi — in November 2026, when the teenager scored for Spain at a World Cup, I chose to write about his load chart instead, because I know how fast a small body breaks under heavy load. Kanjuruhan's accounting is the large-scale version of the same logic: run a system under excessive load and it eventually collapses, and the weakest people pay the price. Football's fire needs a hearth, not a furnace — light it, don't burn it. One thing is clear: if the same promise returns on the same anniversary four years later, there is no measurable evidence of progress. If the chain of impunity holds, reputational risk for PSSI and FIFA becomes permanent. And the biggest risk of all is a repeat crowd-safety failure at a high-rivalry fixture. Policing-protocol reform is probably the most critical and least-reported lever. So what do I watch now? Three things. First, whether a formal, binding stadium-safety roadmap between FIFA and PSSI is published, spelling out gate design, policing protocols and a tear-gas ban. Second, whether any sanction or legal outcome follows Komnas HAM's finding. Third, whether a transparent account emerges of where FIFA Forward money goes, how much, and against which milestones. The day those three answers arrive, Kanjuruhan stops being only memory and becomes a settled ledger. The debt of 135 names is not paid by an anniversary condolence message.