Kanjuruhan, 131 Lives and the Safety Gap FIFA Cannot Patch Alone

In the 45th minute of Arema FC versus Persebaya Surabaya on 1 October 2026, the Kanjuruhan stands in Malang were packed. At full time, with the score 2-3 to the visitors, thousands of Arema supporters spilled onto the pitch. Police fired tear gas. The crowd turned and ran toward exit gates 12 and 13, where the doors opened one way only and were far narrower than the reverse flow. 131 people died, more than 30 of them children. It is the worst stadium disaster in Indonesian football history and one of the bloodiest the sport has recorded.

I have watched that footage many times. Each time, I do not see a single technical error. I see a safety system designed for an ordinary match, pushed into a situation that was anything but ordinary.

A derby, a night that lost control

Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya are two powers of East Java football. Their meeting goes far beyond three points. It is regional pride, tickets pushed above their real value, tens of thousands of people travelling hundreds of kilometres to be there. In any safety agency's risk classification, this is the most dangerous match category: large crowds, high emotional density, a tense head-to-head history.

Kanjuruhan has a design capacity of about 42,000. That night, the number of people inside went far beyond it. When a stand holds more people than it was designed for, every calculation about evacuation time is wrong.

After the disaster, Indonesian police named six suspects. They include the Main Director of PT Liga Indonesia Baru, the body that operates the national league; the chairman of the match organising committee; a security officer; and three police officers. The six names run from league organiser to match organiser to the security force. The chain of responsibility does not stop at one individual.

Recently, FIFA President Gianni Infantino met Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto. The central message was safety. FIFA will assist with its expertise. Safety was placed alongside the priorities of the government and the national football federation.

When the ball stops, I start reading the game

When the ball stops, I start reading the game. At Kanjuruhan, the ball stopped literally: the final whistle, and then everything.

Stadium safety is a flow-design problem. A headcount of police does not solve it. Exit gates are where everything begins. In every international safety standard, exit doors must open in the direction the crowd moves, must be wide enough that the flow is not compressed, and must have backup routes when the main route jams. At Kanjuruhan, the gates opened one way and were not wide enough. When thousands of people change direction at once, the flow becomes a compressed mass. People fall, the people behind do not know, and pressure from behind keeps pushing forward. That is the silent killing mechanism of every crush disaster.

Then there is tear gas. In an enclosed space, tear gas does not disperse a crowd. It removes visibility, removes orientation, and turns an orderly stream of people into a panicked one. The measure is used to control, but inside a narrow corridor its real effect is to amplify chaos.

Beyond infrastructure, there is the human factor. A safe stadium needs stewards — safety staff trained to guide crowds, talk to spectators, and open doors at the right moment. A stadium guarded by armed force operates on a logic of confrontation. That logic works when the crowd is small and calm. When the crowd is large and panicked, it backfires.

And data is the most easily ignored piece. A modern stand needs people-counting cameras, density sensors, and a control room reading the flow in real time. Without data, an organiser only learns the stadium is overloaded when it is already too late.

Modern football has no randomness, only data that has not been read. At Kanjuruhan, the data on density, on exit speed, on actual capacity was ignored before the whistle blew.

History already wrote the answer

Football history has recorded enough disasters that we do not need to guess. In 2026, at Hillsborough, 97 Liverpool supporters died in a stand blocked by fencing with a crowd compressed behind it. Britain did not stop at prosecuting individuals. It rewrote its entire stadium-safety legal framework, mandated seating, and introduced a safety licence requirement for every ground. In 2026, in Accra, more than 120 people died after police used tear gas at a derby. In 2026, in Port Said, 74 people died after a tense match. Three decades, three continents, and the same script: narrow gates, fencing, tear gas, and a crowd with no way out.

What every stadium disaster shares does not lie in the personality of the fans. It lies in the exit design and in the decisions of the operators during the final thirty minutes. That is why the countries that learned the lesson all moved in the same direction: making safety a legal condition for being allowed to stage a match, rather than a goodwill promise.

FIFA has a stadium safety and security rulebook requiring a named safety officer for each match, an approved safety plan, and coordination with local authorities. But a rulebook only has value when someone signs it and there is a sanction for breaking it. Expertise can be sent on a flight. Signatures and sanctions have to be built at home.

The majority looks at the star; I look at the gap

The majority looks at the star; I look at the gap. The gap here lies between FIFA's expertise and the ability to enforce it domestically.

The safest reading is: FIFA arrives, expertise arrives, everything gets better. I do not read it that way. A global body having to intervene personally in one country's stadium safety is a sign that the domestic system has failed, not a piece of good news. Expertise can be transferred in weeks. Changing how a league operates takes years.

There is a structural contradiction here. The body that must enforce safety — the league operator — is the same body whose leadership sits on the suspect list. An organisation that is under investigation while having to reform itself is the hardest problem in governance. Reforms of this kind usually stop at statements, unless a third party monitors them and there is a concrete sanction.

Criminal responsibility and system responsibility are also two different things. Six people may go to court. But exit gates do not widen themselves after a verdict.

There is another risk rarely mentioned: the pressure to prove everything is fine. When a country needs to restore its image, a league is easily pushed back into action sooner than safety allows. The big derbies remain on the calendar. If the safety certification is unfinished but the match is played, the old risk is simply postponed to another day.

Vietnam is not outside this story

Based on my experience following matches in Southeast Asia, Vietnam is not outside this story. Many domestic stadiums have decayed, corridors are narrow, exit doors are old, and the culture of burning flares in the stands remains. V.League has never seen a disaster on the Kanjuruhan scale, but that is luck in probability, not an achievement of design.

The Beijing alley taught me that when a crowd panics, it always seeks the narrowest passage and follows it. If that narrow passage is blocked, people do not turn back. They compress into one another. That is a measurable physical variable.

A serious safety framework needs three countable things: safety certification per stadium and per season, a named safety officer with legal responsibility for each match, and published crowd-density data. Without those three, any high-level meeting is only an image.

Takeaway

Do not ask who will win; ask who will not collapse. What is worth discussing for Southeast Asian football is not how far FIFA will help Indonesia, but how many stadiums in the region will have their exit-gate widths measured again before the next derby.