PSGC Ciamis and Persikotas Tasikmalaya: A Peace Declaration Before the Ball Rolls at Stadion Galuh

I read the story on a July morning in Marseille, while Europe's sports pages were busy counting every euro of a hundred-million-dollar deal. What made me stop sat near the bottom of the piece, small as a comma: a peace declaration.

Two supporter groups with their own names — Laskar Singacala of PSGC Ciamis, Laskar Wiradadaha of Persikotas Kota Tasikmalaya — were mentioned alongside a sportsmanship campaign and a peace declaration. What does that mean? It means that before signing a cooperation agreement, someone had to sign something else first: a promise that nobody would hit anybody.

Nobody drafts a peace declaration for supporter groups with no history between them. That is the one detail in the entire release that told me something was being left unsaid.

And so I sat there, eleven thousand kilometres from Ciamis, picturing a stadium in the afternoon, the stands half empty, the grass untouched. An empty ground, a seat still in place — the ball had not rolled, but time had already scored. In my trade, that is usually where the real story begins.

What happened in West Java

Where did this happen? In West Java, Indonesia, in a cultural region called Priangan Timur. There, two football entities sit almost shoulder to shoulder: PSGC Ciamis, based in Ciamis Regency, and Persikotas Kota Tasikmalaya, based in Tasikmalaya City. Two neighbouring jurisdictions, a coach ride of a few dozen minutes apart.

According to a report by VIVA, a general-interest Indonesian news portal, the two clubs have established a cooperation. The specifics: Persikotas will use Stadion Galuh in Ciamis as its home ground for the Liga 3 2026/2027 season. PSGC Ciamis opens its stadium to its neighbour. The two sides plan to optimise training facilities and infrastructure to support team preparation, to organise friendly matches and a pre-season tournament.

Herdiat Sunarya, CEO of PSGC Ciamis, said Stadion Galuh has facilities suitable for hosting Liga 2 and Liga 3 matches. He was also quoted saying the cooperation is directly driven by the two chief executives — himself and Ecep Suwardaniyasa, who heads Persikotas Kota Tasikmalaya.

On objectives, Herdiat described a wish to pool the two clubs' potential in order to build a regional football ecosystem that is more professional, more independent and more sustainable. On economics, he said a sentence I read over and over: “We do not look at profit and loss, but at the multiplier effect.”

Where is that effect supposed to flow? Into micro, small and medium enterprises in Ciamis. Into hotels. Into the crowds that come to the regency on matchdays. And further out, into a vision described with a verb of visible caution — “expected to become a space for developing sport tourism in Priangan Timur”.

That is the entire factual content. No player is named. No coach. No squad, no tactics, no metrics, not a single transfer fee, not one contract clause disclosed. No term, no budget, no signing date.

I have to say this up front, because in my trade, the silence of the data is itself a kind of data.

What the deal really is

So what is the nature of this agreement?

It is a ground-share, and at a deeper level, a pooling of resources between two under-resourced clubs. Look at the economic logic that actually stands behind it, rather than the economic logic that gets spoken aloud.

For Persikotas, the most tangible benefit lies somewhere other than revenue. It is avoiding the capital cost of building or renting a venue that meets licensing standards. In Indonesian Liga 3, club licensing criteria may be far lighter than in the tiers above, but the requirement to register a playing venue still exists. A club without an adequate ground must either invest, or rent, or find an arrangement like this one. It is a cost-avoidance calculation, not a revenue-maximisation calculation.

For PSGC, the tangible benefit is raising the utilisation rate of an asset whose maintenance the club pays for whether or not a match is played. A pitch used ten times a year carries a very large per-match share of depreciation. Used twenty times, that share halves. Add the footfall coming into Ciamis on matchdays — that is the “multiplier effect” in its most modest and most checkable form.

But here I have to stop and say it plainly: the multiplier claim is unfalsifiable in the form in which it was stated. No baseline. No metric. No measurement mechanism. Nobody responsible for measuring. In urban economics the multiplier is a real concept, and it is measured by tracking how spending circulates through a local economy. But at the scale of a handful of third-tier matchdays, with limited attendance and low fixture frequency, the absolute value is almost certainly small.

That does not make it meaningless. It makes it a political-economic statement rather than a financial projection. And a political-economic statement does not need to be true — it only needs to be said at the right moment.

There is a large gap nobody has touched: cost allocation. How are gate receipts split? Who pays stadium operating costs? Who maintains the pitch when two teams play on it? Who pays for the floodlights? Who pays for security and policing? In ground-share arrangements around the world, the most common point of failure almost always sits here: not in whether the two parties are well-intentioned, but in who pays for the grass and who pays for the police.

Another under-noticed detail. The agreement is announced for the 2026/2027 season — that is, a bet placed on a future two seasons away. At the base of Indonesian football, Liga 3 formats, competition zoning and club licensing criteria have changed repeatedly. An agreement signed two seasons in advance must survive at least two rounds of regulatory adjustment. This is the least-mentioned risk, and also the most systemic one.

Then there is the human structure. The report describes the cooperation as driven “directly” by two chief executives. No board resolution. No memorandum with a defined term. No joint governance body. This is an agreement that is thick on personality and thin on institution. It stands on two pairs of shoulders. And things that stand on two pairs of shoulders collapse when one pair walks away.

Based on my experience watching matches and community football projects across several countries over nearly three decades, I recognise a recurring pattern: agreements announced in the language of “cooperation” usually have far narrower content than their headline. Here, the headline speaks of a regional football ecosystem. The real content, the most certain part, is the right to use one stadium.

The rest — optimising training facilities, friendlies, a pre-season tournament — is the most interesting part and also the vaguest. But if I had to pick one kernel of real value in the entire release, I would pick this.

Think of it as a product. A small pre-season tournament between Priangan Timur clubs, staged regularly at Stadion Galuh, is a competition product that is low-cost, short-travel and repeatable. The two clubs do not have to travel far. Local spectators get another excuse to come to the ground. Local sponsors get another board to hang their name on. For a third-tier club, that kind of pre-season tournament may have far more practical value than claims about hotel multipliers.

And for young players, it creates what I call a low-cost audition pipeline: shared training facilities, regular friendlies, a small but steady stage on which someone can be seen.

But here is a paradox people usually forget. Priangan Timur sits squarely inside the natural recruitment catchment of Persib Bandung, West Java's Liga 1 power, along with a string of second-tier clubs. Third-tier clubs in this region are net exporters of talent. Any mechanism that makes local players more visible also makes them more visible to wealthier clubs. The net talent-flow effect is therefore ambiguous — it depends entirely on whether the two clubs build a structured player pathway, and none of that appears in the release.

I thought I was writing about a stadium deal — it turns out what I chase is always real people, and the real people in Ciamis and Tasikmalaya now face a very concrete question: once the ball rolls at Stadion Galuh, who gets what?

Behind the release

Now to what the report does not say.

Every statement in the piece — every quote, every objective — comes from one side: Herdiat Sunarya of PSGC Ciamis. Ecep Suwardaniyasa of Persikotas is named as a driver, but not one quotation from him appears. There is no independent confirmation from the second club. No third party verifies the scope or the bindingness of the agreement.

This sourcing asymmetry is the second most important detail of the whole report, after the peace declaration. It suggests one of two possibilities: either this is a PSGC-led initiative with Persikotas following, or the deal is still at memorandum stage with nothing yet for the other side to speak about.

A third detail deserves to be put on the table too: one of the two principals is described as a club chief executive while also carrying a regional public-office profile. That is a structural feature with both upside and downside. Upside: convening power, cross-regional connections, doors that open to government. Downside: the club becomes easy to read as a political instrument, and the fate of the agreement hangs on electoral outcomes. I cannot fully verify this profile from public sources, so I raise it as an open question rather than a conclusion.

Then there is the word “independent” in the stated objectives. Small detail, worth thinking about. At Indonesian provincial clubs, dependence on local government, sponsors or a single benefactor is a familiar pattern. When an agreement puts the word “independent” among its goals, it is usually implicitly admitting that the current dependence is a problem. That deserves credit — but it also deserves the question: independent of what, and by what means, when the agreement itself rests on two individuals?

And here is my most counter-intuitive point.

People are discussing the multiplier effect, the ecosystem, sport tourism. But the largest risk, with the largest consequences, and handled most thinly in the entire release, sits somewhere else entirely: the first match between these two very clubs, in that very stadium.

Picture that day. Two organised supporter groups, with names, with identities, entering one ground. The same entrance, or two entrances sitting side by side. The same ticketing perimeter. The same security deployment plan. In Indonesia, the memory of October 2026 at Kanjuruhan — more than 130 people dead in a crush and a tear-gas deployment — is not a distant memory. It is the foundation on which every match-organisation plan in this country has had to be rewritten.

The peace declaration in the release is therefore no empty slogan. It is a compliance measure packaged as goodwill. Its existence is evidence that both clubs know they are creating an event with a genuine crowd-safety dimension. But the report does not say who pays for security, who is responsible for coordination, who decides the stand-segregation plan. And in the post-Kanjuruhan environment, that is not an administrative detail — it is the central question.

I have stood in stadiums where everything was calculated correctly, and I have witnessed afternoons where one wrongly blocked walkway was enough to turn everything around. A goal that does not shout is sometimes worth more than a hundred minutes of shouting — but one blocked emergency exit can erase every goal.

If I had to say one sentence about this agreement, it is this: it is closer to a shared-services arrangement than to a strategic partnership. Because a strategic partnership requires one party to be stronger. Here, beyond the stadium, neither side is meaningfully superior. Two clubs on the periphery of the Indonesian football economy are pooling risk. That is rational behaviour. It is simply not what the headline suggests.

What to watch next

So here I sit, in the middle of a transfer window roaring with billions, remembering a release with not one unit of currency in it. Among pages full of million-dollar signatures, I remember a diary in which no ball was ever kicked.

The next thing worth watching is not the claims about hotels and small businesses. The next thing worth watching is four very concrete questions. One: does a signed stadium-use document exist, with a date and with cost-allocation terms. Two: does Persikotas publish its own confirmation of scope and duration. Three: when the Liga 3 2026/2027 format is announced, are the two clubs placed in the same group. Four: when the first head-to-head fixture takes place at Stadion Galuh, what does the security plan look like.

Those four questions will tell us more than any press release.

And there is one thing I think I have learned after all these years. At forty-four, I finally understand: sport does not end at the whistle — it keeps rolling inside people. A small regency in West Java is attempting something many places in the world have attempted and many have failed: teaching two communities that sharing one roof does not mean losing a home.

If they succeed, what they leave behind will not be a trophy. It will be a template: how small, poor clubs without a stadium can survive without selling off their identity. And if they fail, there will at least be a lesson about where beautiful agreements usually break — on the last line, where someone has to write down who pays.