There’s something you need to understand about dreams,
friend. They don’t just die—they get murdered. And sometimes, if you know where
to look, you can still see the bloodstains.
In 1983, when Ronald Reagan was president and the world
still made a kind of sense, there was a scene in a comedy film called Maju
Kena Mundur Kena. Three comedians—Dono, Kasino, and Indro—played soccer
against a women’s team. The women weren’t actresses hired for the day. They
were real players from Buana Putri, one of the best women’s football clubs in
Indonesia. They had callused hands and grass stains on their knees and fire in
their bellies that could have lit up Jakarta for a week.
That scene, flickering now in some forgotten archive, is
like a photograph of a ghost. It shows you something that was once alive, once
real, once possible. It shows you what Indonesia looked like when women’s
football wasn’t just a dream but a living, breathing thing with teeth and claws
and the audacity to believe it belonged in this world.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you how it
began, because every horror story worth telling starts with hope.
The Birth of Something Beautiful
February 5, 1969. Bandung was still recovering from the
previous decade’s upheavals, and the air tasted of rain and possibilities. A
woman named Wiwi Hadhi Kusdarti had an idea that would have seemed crazy to
most folks—the kind of idea that makes your neighbors whisper behind their
curtains and your relatives shake their heads at family gatherings.
She wanted to start a women’s football team.
Now, Wiwi wasn’t some starry-eyed dreamer. Her father,
Kadarisman, had been a footballer back when the Dutch still thought they owned
the place. Football was in her blood like malaria, persistent and inescapable.
She’d watched other countries embrace women’s football while Indonesia
pretended it didn’t exist, like a family pretending Uncle Harold doesn’t drink
too much at Christmas dinner.
So she founded Putri Priangan, and it was beautiful in the
way that all dangerous, revolutionary things are beautiful. By 1969—Christ, can
you imagine the courage it took?—they were representing Indonesia in Singapore,
a group of women who’d decided that the word “impossible” was just another way
of saying “we haven’t tried hard enough yet.”
The crowds came. That’s the thing people forget when they
talk about the old days—people actually wanted to watch women play
football. In Sukabumi, so many folks packed into Danalaga Stadium that the wall
collapsed, killing one person and injuring dozens. Even tragedy couldn’t stop
what was coming. It was like trying to hold back the tide with your bare hands.
The Golden Years (Or: When Dreams Had Weight)
The 1970s rolled in like a fever dream, and with them came
something unprecedented: organization. Not the half-assed, bureaucratic kind
that kills more dreams than it nurtures, but the real deal. The kind that
builds foundations and plants seeds and says, “We’re here to stay.”
In 1978, the Indonesian Football Association held a meeting
that would change everything. Picture it: a room full of middle-aged men in
polyester suits, cigarette smoke thick as soup, and someone—God bless Suparyo
Poncowinoto—standing up to say that women deserved their own league.
Four leagues emerged from that smoke-filled room:
- Galatama for professionals
- Galasiswa for students
- Galakarya for workers
- And Galanita. For women.
December 30, 1978. That’s when Galanita officially came into
being, signed into existence with PSSI Decree No. 71-XII/1978. Ali Sadikin’s
signature on that paper was like signing a birth certificate for something the
world had been waiting for without knowing it.
The tournaments that followed weren’t just competitions—they
were celebrations. The Kartini Cup. The Galanita Invitational. Names that
should have echoed through generations but now sound like whispers from a lost
civilization.
Buana Putri dominated those early years like a force of
nature. Their goalkeeper, Muthia Datau, was the kind of player who made you
believe in miracles. She’d started playing at fourteen, back when little girls
who wanted to play football were told to find more “appropriate” hobbies. She
had hands like steel traps and reflexes that seemed to bend time itself.
The stadiums filled. The crowds cheered. For a brief,
shining moment, it looked like women’s football in Indonesia might actually
make it.
The Creeping Darkness
But here’s the thing about hope in Indonesia—it’s always got
something hunting it.
The late 1980s brought changes, the kind that arrive
quietly, like cancer, eating away at healthy tissue while everyone’s looking
the other way. PSSI’s attention wandered back to men’s football, where the
money was easier and the politics more familiar. Galanita found itself an
orphan at its own family reunion.
The women kept playing because that’s what women do—they
keep going even when the world turns its back. But without institutional
support, without media attention, without the simple dignity of being taken
seriously, even the strongest foundations begin to crack.
Cultural attitudes were shifting too, or maybe they’d never
really changed at all. The brief window of acceptance was closing, and suddenly
women who played football were seen as “deviating from their nature.” As if
having a nature that included joy and competition and the simple human desire
to kick a ball around was somehow unnatural.
A 2016 study would later show that female football fans
faced stereotypes and poor treatment, but you didn’t need a university study to
see what was happening. You just needed eyes and a heart that hadn’t been
completely calcified by tradition and fear.
The media stopped covering women’s games. Sponsors
disappeared like smoke. The crowds thinned until stadiums that had once
throbbed with life felt like mausoleums.
The Death Blow
1993. That’s when they made it official. The year they took
Galanita out behind the barn and put a bullet in its head.
Oh, they didn’t call it that. Bureaucrats never do. They
said Galanita’s management was being “dissolved.” They spoke in the bloodless
language of committees and restructuring, but what they meant was simple: women’s
football in Indonesia was being murdered in broad daylight, and nobody seemed
to care enough to call it what it was.
Without competition, talent withered. Without leagues,
dreams died. The national team that had once finished fourth in Asian
competitions plummeted to a FIFA ranking of 109 by March 2024. One hundred and
ninth. Let that number roll around in your mouth like a bitter pill.
Ghosts of the Present
Here’s the really cruel part: the women kept getting better
anyway.
Without domestic leagues, without institutional support,
without any of the infrastructure that makes athletic dreams possible, the
national team somehow scraped together improvement. A 1-1 draw with Jordan in
2025—better than the 0-3 shellacking they’d taken in 2019. Even won their
first-ever trophy at the 2024 AFF Women’s Championship.
It’s like watching someone learn to dance while wearing
chains.
Liga 1 Putri flickered to life briefly in 2019, won by
Persib Putri, but COVID-19 killed it faster than you could say “pandemic.” Now
PSSI Chair Erick Thohir keeps making promises like a politician during election
season. 2026 became 2027 became maybe 2029, each deadline sliding further into
the future like a mirage in the desert.
The players aren’t buying it anymore. After failing to
qualify for the 2026 AFC Women’s Asian Cup, they held up a banner that cut
straight to the bone: “Mr. Erick, when will Liga 1 Putri be held?”
Even the Minister of Youth and Sports is calling for action,
which in Indonesia is roughly equivalent to watching hell freeze over.
National team player Zahra Mudzalifah put it best: “We need
a league—not just to compete, but to grow.” Her teammate Claudia Scheunemann
was even more direct: “We are not extras. We want to be the center. Women’s
football is not just about existence—it’s about struggle.”
The Lesson
There’s a lesson buried in this graveyard of dreams, and it’s
one that Stephen King himself might appreciate: without competition, without
struggle, without the chance to fail and get back up and fail again, talent
doesn’t just stagnate—it dies.
Galanita proved that women could fill stadiums, could
compete internationally, could build something lasting and beautiful. Its death
proved that progress isn’t inevitable, that dreams can be murdered as easily as
they’re born, and that sometimes the real monsters aren’t hiding under beds or
in dark forests.
Sometimes they’re sitting in boardrooms, wearing suits and
ties, speaking in committee language while they drive stakes through the hearts
of everything that makes life worth living.
But here’s the thing about ghosts—they don’t stay buried
forever. And somewhere in Indonesia, young girls are still kicking balls
around, still dreaming impossible dreams, still believing that maybe, just
maybe, they can bring something beautiful back from the dead.
The question isn’t whether women’s football will return to
Indonesia. The question is whether, when it does, anyone will remember what
they killed the first time around.
And whether they’ll let it happen again.
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