The Thing That Came to Jakarta


 

A Tale of Football and Forgotten Dreams

The Visitors

In the steamy heat of Jakarta, 1979, something came calling that would change the world of football forever. Not the kind of thing that crawls out of sewers or haunts small Maine towns—no, this was different. More subtle. More patient. The kind of evil that wears a business suit and carries a briefcase full of dreams.

The Japanese delegation stepped off that plane like missionaries arriving in some godforsaken corner of the world, their eyes bright with the kind of hunger that folks in dusty little towns off Route 66 might recognize—the same look that comes over a man when he’s staring into the dark and knows something’s staring back.

They’d come to study Galatama, Indonesia’s semi-professional football league, and Lord knows they were thorough about it. Real thorough. The way a cancer studies healthy cells before it starts its work.

The Golden Time (That Wasn’t So Golden After All)

See, back then—and this is the part that’ll give you the willies if you think about it too long—Indonesia was the big dog in Asian football. They’d beaten Japan 5-3 in ‘54, crushed them 7-0 in ‘68, and put the final nail in the coffin with a 2-0 victory on February 24, 1980. That last date hangs over Indonesian football like a tombstone inscription, because it was the last time they’d ever beat Japan.

The last time.

After that, something changed. Something fundamental and terrible and final.

Galatama had seemed like such a good idea at the time. Private funding, professional structure, teams with names that rolled off the tongue like incantations: Niac Mitra, Pelita Jaya, Arseto. They had it all figured out—points systems, home-and-away matches, the whole nine yards. Ten teams started that 1979/1980 season, full of hope and swagger and the kind of confidence that comes right before the fall.

But you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men. Sometimes they go to hell, and sometimes hell comes to them.

The Watchers

Tommy Welly, a football observer with the kind of eyes that see too much, would later say: “That they reviewed and conducted a comparative study on Galatama is true. However, Japanese football was not actually that green.”

Green. Like something growing in the dark, patient and persistent.

The thing is, those Japanese visitors weren’t just studying Galatama. Oh no. They were studying everything—German systems, Latin American techniques, European methodologies. They were like scientists collecting specimens, cataloging weaknesses, mapping out the DNA of success.

And all the while, Galatama was rotting from the inside.

The Corruption That Ate Jakarta

Bribery scandals started creeping in like mold in a damp basement. Money changed hands in dark corners, referees looked the other way, and the beautiful game turned ugly. Timo Scheunemann, who’d seen enough football corruption to fill a Stephen King novel, put it best: “Because there were many bribery scandals in Galatama. However, instead of finding solutions, the roots were pulled out.”

The roots were pulled out.

Think about that phrase for a minute. When you pull out the roots, you don’t just kill the plant—you kill everything it might have become. All those possibilities, all those futures, dead and buried.

While Indonesia was pulling out its own roots, something else was growing in Japan. Something that had been planted back in 1960 when they brought in Dettmar Cramer, the West German coach they called “the father of Japanese football.” Twenty years of patient cultivation, strategic planning, systematic development.

By 1983, they had Captain Tsubasa—a manga and anime that infected an entire generation of Japanese kids with football fever. Not the hollow, corporate kind of fever, but the real thing. The kind that gets into your blood and stays there.

The Long Game

The Japanese were playing the long game, you see. While Indonesia was stumbling around in the dark, dealing with scandals and inconsistent strategies, Japan was building something methodical and relentless. The J-League launched in 1993, followed by Indonesia’s Ligina in 1994-1995, but by then it was already too late.

Too late by decades.

The Japan Football Association had a plan—Japan’s Way, they called it. A dual pyramid model aimed at creating 10 million football families and winning a World Cup by 2050. The kind of long-term thinking that would make the folks in a sleepy Midwest town like Hannibal nervous, if they were smart enough to recognize it.

The Truth About Learning

So did Japan “learn” from Indonesia?

Well, that depends on what you mean by learning. If you mean did they sit at Indonesia’s feet like eager students, soaking up wisdom—then no, that’s just folklore. The kind of story people tell themselves when the truth is too painful to swallow.

But if you mean did they study Indonesia the way a predator studies prey, cataloging strengths and weaknesses, looking for opportunities—then yes. Oh, yes they did.

They learned, alright. They learned that talent without structure is worthless. They learned that short-term thinking is a luxury you can’t afford. They learned that corruption is like cancer—it spreads until it kills the host.

Most importantly, they learned that patience is the deadliest weapon of all.

The Horror of It All

The real horror isn’t that Japan studied Galatama and used those lessons to build their football empire. The real horror is what happened to Indonesia afterward—the slow, inexorable decline, the wasted potential, the might-have-beens that pile up like bodies in a Stephen King novel.

Because here’s the thing that keeps me awake at night: in 1979, Indonesia was ahead. They were the teachers, the innovators, the ones with something worth studying. They had Galatama, they had talent, they had history.

And then they threw it all away.

While Japan was building their J-League with Germanic precision and importing international stars, Indonesia was tearing down Galatama rather than fixing its problems. While Japan was nurturing a football culture through Captain Tsubasa, Indonesia was stumbling from scandal to scandal.

The Ghosts of What Might Have Been

Sometimes, late at night, when the Jakarta heat finally breaks and the city grows quiet, you can almost hear them—the ghosts of Indonesian football’s golden age. The echo of boots on turf, the roar of crowds that believed, the dreams of young players who thought they were part of something bigger than themselves.

Those ghosts whisper a single word, over and over:

What if?

What if they’d fixed the corruption instead of abandoning the league? What if they’d maintained that early lead? What if they’d learned from their own successes instead of letting others learn from them?

But in the end, what-ifs are just another kind of ghost story. The truth is simpler and more terrible: Japan didn’t just study Indonesian football—they consumed it. They took what worked, discarded what didn’t, and built something better from the remains.

And Indonesia? Indonesia pulled out its own roots and wondered why nothing would grow.

Epilogue: The Price of Forgetting

The delegation left Jakarta in 1979, their notebooks full of observations, their heads full of plans. They bowed politely, thanked their hosts, and disappeared into the humid night like something that was never really there at all.

But they left something behind—a kind of curse, maybe, or just the natural consequence of being outplayed at your own game. Because that’s the thing about success in football, or life, or horror stories: it’s not enough to be good once. You have to stay good. You have to keep growing, keep learning, keep fighting the corruption that seeps in like water through a cracked foundation.

Indonesia forgot that lesson.

Japan never did.

And somewhere in the distance, if you listen carefully on quiet nights in Jakarta, you can still hear the sound of Japanese boots, marching steadily toward the future, while Indonesian football remains trapped in the amber of its own past, beautiful and perfect and forever 1979.

The visitors got what they came for.

They always do.

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