Four Years After Kanjuruhan: Reading 135 Names and an Exit Too Narrow

On 1 October 2026, in Malang, someone read out 135 names. The reading was slow, slow enough for each syllable to land on the grass. Forty-three of those names belonged to minors; the youngest was three years and ten months old — a name an adult has to read twice before daring to say it correctly.

I sat twelve time zones away, in Liverpool, in a room with nothing but a keyboard. Moscow taught me that every name has its own breath; to mispronounce it is to throttle a soul. Four years earlier, in Kanjuruhan, 135 souls were throttled — by an exit narrower than the crowd it had to hold, and by a cloud of tear gas fired into a place with no way out.

A derby night in East Java

Kanjuruhan Stadium stands in Malang, East Java, Indonesia, with a capacity of roughly forty-two thousand. On the evening of 1 October 2026, Arema FC hosted Persebaya Surabaya in Liga 1. This is the East Java derby: two cities less than a hundred kilometres apart, two supporter groups raised on memories of each other, and a fixture that always demands the highest level of security planning. From the balcony of an old press box, I hear derby noise echoing through layers of memory: on Merseyside it is Liverpool against Everton, in East Java it is Arema against Persebaya. The same sound, the same problem — and the same question left unanswered in the meeting room.

Arema lost 2-3. When the final whistle went, part of the stand spilled onto the pitch. Security responded with tear gas. In an enclosed stand, tear gas does not push a crowd back; it makes a crowd run. And the crowd ran towards exits designed for an ordinary afternoon, not for a stampede.

According to official Indonesian government figures, 135 people died and 583 were injured. Most victims died of asphyxiation in the crush. Ninety of the dead were male and 45 female; 43 were minors; the youngest was three years and ten months; most adults were between 18 and 25. It is the deadliest stadium disaster in Indonesian football history, and one of the deadliest this sport has ever recorded.

Then came the ritual sequence of the global game. FIFA flew flags at half-mast at its Zurich headquarters. Bayern Munich displayed a memorial banner at the Allianz Arena during a Champions League match. Stands at the AFF Cup raised banners, and “Salam Satu Jiwa” — the greeting of one soul — was sung in places where no one from Malang had ever set foot.

The Indonesian government established a Joint Fact-Finding Team, known as TGIPF. Kanjuruhan Stadium was renovated. Four years on, the physical works are finished. The human part is not.

Mechanism, not emotion

One thing must be said at the outset: 135 people did not die of football. They died of a chain of technical and administrative decisions, and their deaths were predictable with a tape measure.

In a crowd beyond a certain density, the human body stops being an individual. Pressure waves travel from the back to the front, nobody can stop, and people die standing upright, chests compressed, starved of oxygen within minutes. Asphyxiation needs no fire and no weapon; it needs only an exit smaller than the crowd. The narrow exit is the choke point, and the choke point is a design decision — signed years earlier, by people who were not there that night.

The tear gas was the second layer. Under FIFA's Stadium Safety and Security Regulations and the international match-law framework, the use of weapons and crowd-control gas inside stadiums is strictly restricted; an enclosed stand is no place to deploy an irritant agent. The Indonesian government's Joint Fact-Finding Team identified the firing of tear gas as one of the primary causes. Two norm systems were breached at once: football's, and the enforcing authority's own.

Placed side by side, Kanjuruhan's numbers are not an anomaly. In 2026, at Hillsborough, 97 people died at an FA Cup semi-final, also because of a blocked access corridor and a crowd-control system that misread its signals. In 2026, at Bradford, 56 people died in a wooden-stand fire. What football has learned from those names, and what it still has not, is a question every federation must answer for itself.

From the balcony of an old press box, I learned to tell a mistake from a system. A mistake is a missed shot in the 88th minute. A system is the fact that nobody, for years, sat down to calculate how many people each exit must hold per second. Every dynasty has a minute of leaving the field that nobody notices; the attentive will record that moment. At Kanjuruhan, that moment sits inside a blueprint.

There is a comparison I keep using about football institutions: a coach switching to a back three after his back four has been cut open. On the surface it is a tactical adjustment; looked at closely, it is how a reputation is insured. Institutions behave the same way. When a narrow exit kills people, the default response is to add a layer: a new fence, a new row of seats, a new memorial day. Added layers are visible. The hole in midfield is not.

Four years on, Kanjuruhan Stadium has been renovated. The victims' families are still demanding justice. The two facts do not contradict each other; they sit on different floors. The physical floor can be completed with a construction contract. The accountability floor needs a ruling, and no one can sign a ruling on someone else's behalf.

Among the dead were 43 minors, the youngest three years and ten months old. This is the detail the industry tends to skim past. It demands a specific design answer: where is the family and children's section, how far is it from the exits, and who is responsible for getting those children out when a stand breaks. In many countries, such provisions were written after a disaster, not before.

On the accountability floor, the file remains open. The Joint Fact-Finding Team issued conclusions on cause and recommendations on security procedure, but four years on, victims' families still hold prayer gatherings attached to a single demand: justice. In football, an open file keeps everything else open too — audience trust, the league's commercial value, and the credibility of those running it. For a league trying to expand its market, that risk takes the shape of a silent discount: sponsors read the news, weigh it up, and say nothing.

The reverse angle: memory cannot redraw a blueprint

The most comfortable thing football can do with Kanjuruhan is turn it into a moving story. We are good at that. We write about the tears, the wreaths, the banners strung across stands. Based on my experience of watching matches, I know the power of one real human moment: in 2026, at Anfield, during the Merseyside derby, I wrote a long passage about an elderly supporter crying like a child instead of analysing the tactics. I do not regret that passage. I regret not adding one line about how many exits that stand had.

The blind spot of collective memory lies here: memory wants a guilty party. It needs a person to point at, a moment for outrage. But a narrow exit has no face. It is a row of figures in a handover file, approved by a committee, in a meeting nobody remembers. If we commemorate only with emotion, we will rebuild that same stadium in another city, under another name, in another decade.

There is one more trap: the annual memorial day. It is necessary, but it can also become a ritual that substitutes for reform — one day for the whole industry to fall silent, and then business as usual the next morning. A silent summer does not announce collapse; it only clears the road for it. At Kanjuruhan, the silent summer lasted years: the security meetings, the risk assessments, the exits that were never measured again.

I have sat in press boxes that no longer exist, to write about matches that never grow old. This trade taught me that the football market prices a nineteen-year-old's left foot down to the last decimal, while there is no price list for the width of an escape corridor. The noise of intermediaries distorts the whole industry's attention: we argue about transfer fees, contracts, and numbers nobody verifies — and leave the verifiable numbers, like the capacity of an exit, sitting in a drawer.

In the summer of 2026, when football stopped for the pandemic, I followed a semi-professional club in the Merseyside area training in an empty stadium. I learned something there: when the shouting disappears, you finally hear the real sounds of a ground — the whistle, the footsteps, an iron gate closing. Stadium safety is the same. It can only be heard when someone is willing to sit still and measure.

What remains

Kanjuruhan's wound does not belong to Indonesian football alone. It is the test every federation must retake each season, and most fail it on the same question: how many people does our stand hold, and how do they get out.

Global football responded correctly at the symbolic level: half-mast flags in Zurich, a banner in Munich, stands singing the greeting of one soul. The symbolic level is the easiest one. The other level is harder and gets less airtime: banning tear gas in statute, setting a maximum number of people per square metre of exit route, and giving an independent body the power to close a stand that fails the standard.

The 135 names deserve to be read aloud once a year. But a name only becomes safe when it turns into a figure on a blueprint. Humility is not knowing you were wrong; it is learning someone's name correctly — and for an industry, humility is re-measuring the escape corridor before the next season begins.