When Indonesian midfielder Asep Berlian signed a contract to play last year with top local club Surabaya United, it looked like he had secured a lucrative future among the country’s elite.
However, soccer in the country ground to a halt soon afterwards, and the 25-year-old and many others like him have been left scraping a living by playing in small, low-key tournaments.
The crisis was triggered when the domestic league was halted due to a row between the country’s soccer association and the Indonesian Ministry of Youth and Sports, and was then compounded by FIFA’s decision to suspend Indonesia over government meddling.
Photo: AFP
“This is very hard for players, because we earn our livelihood from football,” Berlian said at an ad hoc tournament in the small town of Cilacap, on the main island of Java, that attracted a number of big-name players desperate for a chance to earn even meagre wages.
Soccer in Indonesia has been dogged by problems for years, from the creation of a breakaway association that tore the soccer establishment apart to cases of foreign players dying after going unpaid and being unable to afford medical treatment.
However, the current crisis is the most serious yet.
Top players who no longer have clubs to play for are willing to risk career-ending injuries competing in exhibition matches and small, village tournaments, and other players and coaches are leaving to pursue their careers abroad.
“Indonesian football is dying,” said Aris Budi Sulisto, a former coach from East Java club Persik Kediri, which used to be part of Indonesia’s top league. “It will be very hard to get players back to their peak performance.”
The Cilacap event was typical of the kind of competition that Indonesian players are now taking part in, and saw well-known stars, including veterans of the national side, playing in a basic stadium.
With modest prize money at stake, and a scoreboard changed manually by a stadium groundskeeper, the small-town meet was a world away from the glitzy league matches beamed from Indonesia’s big cities to tens of millions of fans across the soccer-crazy country.
Berlian admitted playing in such competitions was not ideal, but said he had no choice after his salary was slashed.
“If there was a [league] competition, of course I would not be playing in this village tournament,” he said.
The crisis began brewing last year as the soccer association and the sports ministry locked horns over which teams could participate in the top division, the Super League.
The feud boiled over in April last year when the association suspended domestic competition, only for the ministry to retaliate by freezing the association’s activities.
FIFA — which takes a dim view of governments interfering in domestic associations — then intervened, criticizing Jakarta for the effective “takeover” of Indonesian soccer and giving it a deadline to allow the association to resume its business.
Talks failed to break the impasse and in May last year FIFA banned Indonesia’s beloved national team, and its professional clubs, from competing in international soccer, including qualifying matches for the 2018 World Cup and 2019 Asian Cup.
Indonesian soccer has been in limbo ever since, with an interim committee set up by FIFA failing to mend the rift between the government and the association.
Emergency talks held this week appear to have made some ground.
Agum Gumelar, the head of the interim committee, said Indonesian President Joko Widodo had ordered the sports ministry to lift the ban on the soccer association, but talks are ongoing and it is unclear when — or if — this will happen.
Despite signs of progress, FIFA looks unlikely to lift its ban on Indonesia soon. In a statement on Wednesday, its executive committee recommended a decision on Indonesia’s future be postponed, and that it be barred from voting in FIFA’s presidential election.
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