Persikotas to Be Based at Galuh Stadium: When Indonesia's Lower-Tier Football Teaches Us About Symbiosis

The morning in Ciamis was cool and damp, like an unrinsed cloth. I stood at the gate of Galuh Stadium, which next season will no longer belong to just one club. A security guard opened the gate and asked where I was from. I said: Vietnam. He smiled and produced the only English sentence he knew — "Welcome. Football for all." That sentence stayed with me throughout the trip. Because here, in a land where football is not a billion-dollar industry but the heartbeat of a whole community, people do not talk to each other about broadcasting rights or transfer values. They talk about whether a club has a place to play, and whether it has a home it can call its own. Persikotas Tasikmalaya Nusantara FC — a club playing in Indonesia's Liga 3 — has just found such a home. And paradoxically, that home sits in the homeland of a regional rival: Galuh Stadium, Ciamis. A lower-tier club sharing the ground of a higher-tier club, separated by a mountain range and an administrative border, and both declaring this the beginning of a future for East Priangan football. I have followed stories like this long enough to know that behind every glossy cooperation announcement there usually hides a far more difficult equation than what is said aloud. Before dissecting this story, let us frame it properly. Indonesian football is organized as a pyramid: Liga 1 is the top flight, Liga 2 the second tier, Liga 3 the third tier with a heavily regionalized structure, and below that provincial amateur competitions. At these two lowest tiers, broadcasting revenue is negligible. Club income comes mainly from local sponsorship, gate receipts, and — a distinctly Indonesian trait — patronage from regional governments and wealthy owners. In such an ecosystem, clubs regularly withdraw mid-season, hit licensing problems, and live in financial fragility. In an environment like this, every resource-sharing arrangement carries far more strategic value than its outward appearance suggests. PSGC Ciamis plays in Liga 2. Persikotas Tasikmalaya plays in Liga 3. Both clubs sit within the same cultural region — East Priangan, the land of the Sundanese people, where local football is tightly bound to village identity. According to VIVA, Persikotas has officially made Galuh Stadium its home ground for the 2026/27 season, and the two clubs have opened a broad cooperation: youth player development, coach education, sports tourism, supporter education, marketing and commercial partnerships. The man behind the initiative is Persikotas advisor Undang Sudrajat. The voice representing Persikotas is its CEO, H. Ecep Suwardaniyasa. And the man holding both the most important and the most notable role is Herdiat Sunarya — simultaneously the Regent (regional head) of Ciamis and the CEO of PSGC. The first thing to face squarely: this is a symbiotic arrangement, but not a balanced one. In any partnership between a higher-tier and a lower-tier club, the balance of power almost always tilts toward the stronger side. Persikotas is structurally the weaker party in every respect. It plays at a lower tier. It lacks a compliant home ground of its own — had it one, it would not be crossing into another regency, Ciamis, to borrow one. And in the released information, it is Persikotas that is "given the opportunity" to use Galuh Stadium. The language of giving, granting, bestowing says everything about the relationship of status. Persikotas is not an equal partner entering a joint venture; it is the recipient, and what it receives first and foremost is a home. At first hearing, this sounds disadvantageous. But this is where my professional instinct — after years covering regional football, not only in China but across Southeast Asia — tells me the opposite. For a Liga 3 club, not having to invest in and maintain its own infrastructure is a massive saving. At this level, what kills a club is not losing on the pitch, but having no money to pay wages and no compliant ground to register. If Persikotas had to provide its own stadium, it would burn part of an already thin budget on concrete and artificial turf instead of players. Sharing a ground with PSGC turns that fixed cost into a shared cost. It is a financially sober move, even if it is not glamorous. But the story does not stop at renting a stadium. If it were only about renting, no one would hold a press conference and speak of "a good start for the future." What deserves analysis is the list of cooperation. Read it closely: player development, coach education, sports tourism, supporter education, marketing and commerce. This is not a random list. This is a roadmap for turning two small clubs into a single regional economic and cultural entity, with East Priangan identity as the product. And I want to analyze each piece, because each piece tells a different story about ambition — and about the gaps that remain unspoken. The first piece: player development and coach education. This is the part that sounds most noble — two neighboring clubs nurturing the region's young talent. But tracking similar models across many football cultures, I recognize an almost inevitable rule: in a partnership between a higher-tier and a lower-tier club, the flow of talent tends to run one way, upward. Persikotas's best players will naturally gravitate toward PSGC, where the competition tier is higher, the opportunity greater, and — most importantly — the attention larger. Persikotas plays the planter; PSGC plays the harvester. Unless there are clear protective mechanisms in the contract — and in the published information, I see none — the benefits of player development will flow more toward the higher-tier side. This does not mean the cooperation is bad for Persikotas; it means the benefits are asymmetric, and should be seen as such. The second piece: sports tourism. This is the most interesting and also the most underrated point in most coverage. When a club mentions "sports tourism," it is not only talking about football. It is talking about turning matchday into a regional economic product — where spectators do not merely come to watch and leave, but eat, sleep, shop, and carry the local image outward. At the Liga 2 and Liga 3 level, this is often the only route to increasing revenue without depending on television. It also explains why the local government is interested: football becomes a tool for regional economic development, no longer merely a matter of winning and losing on the pitch. The third piece: marketing and commerce. This is the economic heart of the arrangement, and the most vaguely described part. The released information speaks of "opportunities opened" for commercial partnerships, for regional and national sponsors, for shirt and merchandise sales. But there is not a single number. No stadium rent. No revenue split. No contract duration. No joint brand ownership mechanism. This is the single most important information gap in the entire story: everything announced is intention, not a verifiable commitment. And in the world of lower-tier football, where clubs are notorious for announcing grand plans and letting them wither, the difference between intention and commitment is the difference between a future and a press release. I have witnessed this too many times. Across many football cultures, whenever two clubs sign a Memorandum of Understanding, local media praise it as a turning point. A few months later, when a political term changes or an owner loses interest, the agreement becomes a stack of paper lying still in a drawer. I am not saying that will happen to Persikotas and PSGC. I am saying that the structure of this arrangement — resting more on personal relationships and political goodwill than on a tight commercial contract — makes it vulnerable to outside change. Look at the people behind the arrangement. Undang Sudrajat, Persikotas advisor, is the initiator. Ecep Suwardaniyasa, Persikotas CEO, is the representative. And Herdiat Sunarya, Regent of Ciamis and PSGC CEO, holds both political power and football power on the partner's side. These three men form the entire backbone of the arrangement. This means its existence depends on them remaining in place — a dependence on individuals rather than institutions, and that is the inherent structural weakness of this kind of regional cooperation model. A leadership change at the regional level, an election, a new term, and the entire foundation can wobble. Here, the Regent's dual role deserves emphasis with the care it warrants. A regional head who is simultaneously the CEO of a club, and that club is the party "opening the door" for another club to use a public stadium. This is a structure that in governance language is called a potential conflict of interest: the same person is both the manager of a public asset and a beneficiary of how that public asset is used. This does not automatically mean anything wrong. But it does mean that if this arrangement succeeds, outsiders have the right to ask about transparency: on what terms is the stadium used, who pays how much, and who decides? I realize I am writing about a subject Vietnam also has close experience with. In Vietnam's lower tiers, the story of a club using another locality's stadium, the relationship between clubs and government, and clubs surviving on regional patronage — all of this is familiar. But what makes the Ciamis case notable is not the borrowing of a stadium. It is that two clubs are sharing not only concrete, but a vision of regional identity. And that is where the story becomes truly complex. Because regional identity here is anything but simple. PSGC has a supporter group named Laskar Singacala. Persikotas has a supporter group named Laskar Wiradadaha. And the most notable piece of information — the one most coverage ignored — is that the two clubs announced supporter education and a peace declaration between these two fan groups. Let me say plainly what everyone understands but few write: no one signs a peace declaration between two supporter groups if there has never been tension between them. A peace declaration is a reactive measure, not a spontaneous gesture of goodwill. It silently tells us there were past clashes, provocations, territorial lines drawn in words and sometimes in fists. And here is the paradox I want to put on the table: two rival supporter groups sharing a stadium more regularly often does not reduce the risk of conflict — it can increase it. When two fan bases with a history of friction are forced to come to the same place, at the same time, and see each other more frequently, the probability of encounter rises. The clubs are trying to turn this into a story of unity. But unity is a goal, not an accomplished fact. And in football, the distance between a peace declaration and a genuinely peaceful stand can be filled by a single moment of loss of control on some Saturday night. There are apologies that do not need tolerance, only a stand tolerant enough. But there are also peace declarations that do not need belief, but time and patience to prove themselves. I am not skeptical of the goodwill of those who signed. I only recall that local football has very long memories, and those memories do not vanish merely because of a press conference. Seen broadly, this story shows something that lower-tier football across Southeast Asia is gradually discovering: alone you are weak, combined you are strong. In an environment where every small club struggles to survive, two neighboring clubs combining into a bloc to negotiate with sponsors, to elevate the regional brand, to turn matchday into a tourism product — that is an economically rational logic. The audience of East Priangan is not a single club's customer; it is a region's customer. If you sell to a region, your marketing costs are shared, your audience base is wider, and your bargaining power with local sponsors is far stronger than a third-tier club standing alone soliciting sponsorship. I wonder whether this model could be applied in Vietnam. We have provinces and cities where two or three clubs coexist within a shared economic and cultural region, yet almost always compete in silence for attention and sponsorship money from local government and businesses. That competition is sometimes useful, but at the lower-tier level it often leads to everyone being miserable together. The Ciamis model, if executed well, proposes a different approach: instead of fighting over an ever-shrinking pie, make the pie bigger together. Sounds simple. But to do it, you need to surrender a bit of club ego — something football, with its proud character, rarely consents to do. Of course, to judge whether the arrangement is on the right track, we need concrete signals. And here is what I will track if I am assigned to cover this story over the coming months. First — and most importantly — whether an official document is publicly released with clear terms: rent, duration, revenue-sharing mechanism. The existence of such a document would move the story from personal goodwill to institutional binding, and that is the greatest sign of maturity the arrangement could reach. Second, I will look at actual player movement: how many players move between the two clubs, in which direction, and on what terms? If only Persikotas players move up and no one comes down, we know the talent flow truly operates asymmetrically — however beautiful the language of cooperation sounds. Third, I will follow matchday reports at Galuh Stadium: are there any security incidents between the two fan bases? And fourth, I will watch whether any new regional or national sponsor actually signs within three to six months. If the clubs only speak of sponsorship opportunities and no one signs anything, then those "opportunities" are just a pretty word in a press release. What interests me most about this story, ultimately, is not Indonesian football. It is how small communities, in places professional Western football does not notice, are finding ways to keep their football alive. They have no superstars. They have no pay television. They have no billionaire owners. What they have is specific people — an advisor seeking to initiate, a CEO daring to open a door, a regional head willing to stake his reputation. And they have something money cannot buy: a land, an identity, and supporters who, though they sometimes fight, still come to the stadium for their club. The rhythm of a match is not in the scoreline, but in the silence between two passes. And in lower-tier football, the true rhythm of the game lies in the silence between two seasons — where clubs decide whether they can survive, not by goals but by quiet agreements few notice. Persikotas and PSGC have just created such a silence. What happens in that silence — in the coming months, in the undisclosed terms, in the matches where two supporter groups first sit in the same stand — will decide whether this is the beginning of a future, or merely a pretty press release remembered and then forgotten. I keep the rhythm for those running on the pitch — that is how I belong to the match. But there are people who do not run on the pitch yet still decide the fate of the match: those drafting contracts, those signing memoranda, those calculating whether the stadium rent can be paid. Their football has no stoppage time to shine in. All they have, and all they need, is one more season. If this arrangement helps Persikotas and PSGC gain one more season, one more season for the children of the region to grow up dreaming of wearing their hometown club's shirt, then that — not the league table — will be the true measure of success. And perhaps the greatest success football can bring to a land is not a title, but that after many years, people still have a club to believe in. The only question left is whether those who sign today have the patience to turn a good start into a sustainable future, or will stop at the joy of a first press conference.