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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