Persikotas to Base at Galuh Stadium: One Regional Deal, Two Different Fates

The grass at Galuh Stadium was still damp on a late morning after overnight rain. A groundskeeper moved along the touchline, gathering leaves toward the corner flag, slow and steady in the way of a habit worn into the hands. The far stand stood empty. No microphone test, no ball rattling off a post, no one calling anyone's name. An empty stadium is a different thing from an unoccupied one: it is a room already swept, waiting for someone to walk in. In an empty dressing room, I hear a match that has never been broadcast.

That is where Persikotas Tasikmalaya Nusantara FC will play its home fixtures. A club competing in Indonesia's Liga 3 has chosen, as its base, a stadium outside its own regency. The man who announced it was Ecep Suwardaniyasa, the club's chief executive. He called it a good start for the future of East Priangan football. Short, tidy, well-intentioned — and precisely because of that, worth reading slowly.

In 2026, a small pitch planted a question in me: where does football beat when nobody scores? The first answer I found was not on the pitch. It was in corridors, in meeting rooms, in documents nobody reads aloud. The arrangement between Persikotas and PSGC Ciamis belongs to exactly that category: a football event in which no ball is kicked.

Context: two clubs, one region, two tiers

Indonesia's football pyramid is clearly layered. Liga 1 sits at the top. Below it is Liga 2, the national second division. Then comes Liga 3, a heavily regionalised third tier where clubs live on local relationships far more than on broadcast money. PSGC Ciamis play in Liga 2. Persikotas Tasikmalaya Nusantara FC play in Liga 3. One tier apart, one administrative border apart.

East Priangan — the south-eastern corner of West Java — comprises Tasikmalaya, Ciamis, Garut, Banjar and several neighbouring regencies. It is a football region with strong supporter traditions and little money. No club here plays in Liga 1. Sports infrastructure is not short on quantity but short on compliance. Regency-level stadiums are typically built from local budgets, serve multiple purposes, and renting them out to a club for a league campaign is routine within the system.

What makes this story notable is not the ground-sharing. It is that two clubs speak about each other in the language of cooperation rather than competition. A second-tier club opens its home ground to a third-tier club. A third-tier club finds a foothold in a neighbouring regency. And behind both stand specific people with specific titles and specific relationships.

Based on my experience following matches in the lowest tiers of several football systems, the lesson is consistent: at that level, the map of power is not drawn with points. It is drawn by who lends a stadium to whom, who introduces whom to a sponsor, and who vouches for whom before the competition committee.

What was announced — and what was not

The information released was broad: Persikotas takes Galuh Stadium as its home base; the two clubs cooperate across player development, coaching development, sports tourism, supporter education, market expansion and commercial partnerships, targeting regional and national sponsors alongside merchandising opportunities.

Names were provided too: Herdiat Sunarya, currently Regent of Ciamis and simultaneously CEO of PSGC; Ecep Suwardaniyasa, CEO of Persikotas; and Undang Sudrajat, advisor to Persikotas and the initiator of the arrangement. On the terraces, the two supporter groups — Laskar Singacala of PSGC and Laskar Wiradadaha of Persikotas — issued a peace declaration alongside a supporter-education component.

What was not announced deserves equal listing, because the silence carries weight. No contract value. No tenancy duration. No revenue-sharing mechanism. No sponsor already signed. No clause describing how Persikotas players would move up to PSGC, at what fee, over what period. No legal instrument named — lease, memorandum of understanding, or administrative permit. An arrangement described through objectives rather than terms is an arrangement still in the announcement stage. That is not the reporter's fault; it is the nature of the genre. But readers should know what they are reading: an open plan, or a closed deal.

Why a home ground matters so much in Liga 3

To viewers used to major leagues, a home ground is paperwork. To a third-tier club, it is a condition of existence.

First comes licensing. The competition organiser requires a club to register an official match venue. That venue must meet minimum standards for pitch surface, floodlighting, technical areas, dressing rooms, crowd control and escape routes. Many regency stadiums in Indonesia do not meet all of these at once. For a club without its own ground, finding a compliant stadium within a workable travel radius is a survival task every season.

Second comes cost. Playing home matches at a venue far from the club's base means organising travel, hotels, buses and meals every round. But playing somewhere too far from the local fanbase is worse: empty stands, zero ticket revenue, and home advantage reduced to an abstraction. Having a stadium without having a crowd is close to not having a stadium at all.

Third comes identity. A third-tier club lives on its community's sense of belonging. When the team must play in another regency, that thread stretches. Supporters want to watch their club, but thirty or forty kilometres along West Java's mountain roads at night is a very practical reason to stay home.

Persikotas chose Galuh Stadium, in Ciamis. For people in Tasikmalaya, this is not a home ground geographically. It is a home ground administratively. The distance between those two things is the distance every arrangement of this kind must bridge — and usually the bridge is not long enough.

From a purely operational angle, the deal resolves a specific constraint: Persikotas has a registered venue. From an identity angle, it creates a new constraint: the club has a stadium but may not yet have a home.

The economics of a shared ground

At this tier, broadcast revenue is close to negligible. A third-tier Indonesian club's income statement typically rests on four sources: local sponsorship, ticketing and merchandise, local government support, and owner funding. All four depend on one thing — the club's physical presence in community life.

Renting a stadium to a club converts public infrastructure into an operating revenue stream. For PSGC it is income, and also a way of demonstrating to the regency government that the stadium is being used efficiently. For Persikotas it is an expense, but far smaller than building or renovating a facility of its own. Infrastructure cost savings are an immediate, visible benefit that requires no complex data to verify.

The more interesting half of the deal is commercial cooperation. When two clubs stand before a sponsor, they are not selling two separate slots. They are selling a market. East Priangan has millions of residents, a distinct cultural identity and a strong local football tradition. To a regional sponsor — a local bank, a retail chain, a consumer brand — a package spanning two clubs and two supporter bases is a more attractive proposition than two small contracts. Here caution is required. Joint sponsorship revenue materialises only when a contract is signed. Until then, everything is potential. In a third-tier club's arithmetic, potential does not pay for buses, meals or lodging.

And there is a cost line nobody mentions in press releases: the operating cost of a shared ground. Fixtures must be staggered. The pitch absorbs double the usage. Security must be split into shifts. Technical areas must be demarcated. These costs rarely appear in the original budget, yet they surface steadily across a season.

The asymmetry: who receives, who grants

Reading the language of the announcement closely, the power structure becomes clear.

Persikotas is the party granted the opportunity to use the stadium. Persikotas is the party in the lower division. Persikotas is the party seeking youth-development cooperation. Put those three together and the conclusion needs no argument: in this relationship, Persikotas is the junior partner.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Senior-junior relationships are normal in football and can benefit both sides. The smaller club gains a venue, exposure to better operating models and a route upward for its young players. The larger club gains revenue, squad depth and regional influence. That is the logic of resource consolidation in an area where neither club is strong enough to stand alone.

But the nature of the arrangement should be named accurately. This is a regional pooling of resources in which benefits are asymmetrical. Without specific safeguards, most of the added value will flow toward the party with the stronger position — the one with the stadium, the higher division and the stronger political connections.

I have seen this model in many places. A small club signs a cooperation agreement with a bigger one. Two years later the small club has lost its best players, lost autonomy over its tactical direction, and still lacks a ground of its own. Not because anyone acted in bad faith, but because the relationship was structured that way from the outset, and nobody wrote protective clauses for the weaker side.

The youth pipeline: a one-way arrow?

The most frequently mentioned element of cooperation is youth development and coaching development. It is also the most consequential long-term and the hardest to verify.

In theory the structure is sensible. PSGC in Liga 2 need squad depth, have better training conditions and a more professional coaching setup. Persikotas in Liga 3 can reach local youth players at grassroots level, where a second-tier club rarely treads. Join the two halves and you get a complete pipeline: scouting below, development above.

But the movement along that pipeline almost always runs one way. Persikotas' best young players move up to PSGC. Players not good enough for PSGC come back down. This is the rule of every feeder-club model. It is not wrong sportingly — it optimises talent use. It does mean, however, that Persikotas may become a transit station rather than a destination.

For a third-tier club trying to establish an identity, that is a genuine risk. Supporters in Tasikmalaya want to watch players they know by name grow up in their colours. If the best youngsters leave after one season, the stands gradually lose their reason to attend.

The safeguards available are simple and widely used: minimum contract terms before transfer, transparent training compensation, fixed-duration loan clauses, buy-back priority, and guaranteed minutes for young players at the parent club. The problem is that none of these appear anywhere in the available information.

A goal is only the rest that closes a long song sung by eleven people. At this level, that rest is a long way off. What is happening now is the intro — and the intro decides the whole song.

Three people, one agreement

One striking feature of this story is how much it depends on individuals.

Ecep Suwardaniyasa is the main spokesperson, the man who named the arrangement and framed it in optimistic language. Undang Sudrajat is identified as Persikotas' advisor and the initiator — meaning the idea came from a figure with community standing rather than from an institutional process.

And Herdiat Sunarya stands at the intersection of both worlds: he is Regent of Ciamis, head of the regency administration, and simultaneously CEO of PSGC Ciamis, the club that controls the stadium.

That structure deserves to be looked at directly. A sitting local-government official, in a personal capacity, leads an organisation granted use of a public asset. When that organisation opens the asset to a third party, the question is not about motive but about the transparency of the mechanism.

None of this means anything improper has occurred. In many regions, local leaders holding club titles is common and is often treated as an advantage, connecting sport to local development policy. But precisely because it is common, it becomes a blind spot: nobody asks, and everything then rests on one person's goodwill.

Depending on one person's goodwill means depending on one person's schedule. Local administrations have terms. The office of Regent has a term. A club needs an agreement that outlives that term. If the cooperation is built on personal relationships rather than a long-dated document, it can vanish with the person who signed it.

A sound agreement must answer one question: if everyone sitting at this table today walked away tomorrow, what would remain?

The peace declaration and a shared stadium

Of everything in the source material, the detail that stopped me longest was not the ground-sharing but the peace declaration between Laskar Singacala and Laskar Wiradadaha — the supporter groups of PSGC and Persikotas.

People do not issue peace declarations between groups that have never had trouble. The inclusion of supporter education and a peace statement signals a prior history of tension serious enough that both sides felt the need to end it publicly.

This is the internal contradiction of the whole arrangement. Two clubs advocate cooperation. Two supporter groups are asked to reconcile. At the same time, those groups are about to share a physical space more regularly than ever before. The same stadium, the same gates, the same approach roads, the same food stalls outside.

The distance between the two groups shrinks from tens of kilometres to tens of metres. In football, reduced physical distance does not automatically reduce tension. Sometimes it increases it.

Shared-venue security arrangements usually have to solve very concrete problems: segregated stands for away supporters, separated circulation routes, opening and closing times, and a plan for when two crowds meet at the junction outside. Without those, a peace declaration is a handsome piece of paper.

I once watched a match halted for twenty minutes because of something outside the ground, at a junction three hundred metres away. On the pitch, the ball had not moved. In the paperwork, everything was compliant. Football's real risk does not live in the paperwork.

Sports tourism and regional identity as a product

Another item in the cooperation package is sports tourism development, alongside market expansion, commercial partnership and merchandising.

Read conventionally, this is the most aspirational and vaguest part. Sports tourism is a lovely concept in a seminar and hard to realise at regency level. It demands transport infrastructure, accommodation, ancillary products and a fixture list compelling enough to make people travel.

Read differently, it reveals something notable: the two clubs are trying to sell not a match but a region. East Priangan has mountains, cuisine, Sundanese culture and a local football tradition. A matchday can be packaged as a trip. That is a very different mindset from a club that only sells tickets.

If someone in the regency administration sees this agreement as a local economic development tool, then the arrangement has a patron more powerful than any sponsor. And for that very reason, it is bound more tightly to local politics than to football.

Merchandise is the most measurable item in this group. Shirt revenue is the simplest indicator of supporter engagement. A third-tier club selling shirts in a neighbouring regency is a real signal. A third-tier club merely talking about merchandising potential has nothing yet.

What Indonesian lower-league football actually looks like

To read this story correctly, it must be placed in the context of the league system.

Indonesia's lower divisions are known for instability. Clubs withdraw mid-season. Licensing problems recur. Budgets depend on owners and local government. Fixture lists get revised. Some clubs disappear and reappear under new names. In that environment, a resource-sharing arrangement carries far more strategic value than its modest appearance suggests.

In that environment, the scarcest commodities are not transfer fees. They are a compliant stadium, a stable fixture list and a sponsor that pays on time. This agreement targets all three.

In that environment, too, half of all cooperation announcements go nowhere. That is the rate I have observed after years following lower divisions across several countries: many meetings, a fair number of memoranda, few concrete outcomes. The cause is rarely malice. It is the absence of anyone responsible for delivery once the meeting ends.

An arrangement exists only when someone's daily job is to make it exist.

A contrarian read: what outsiders are getting wrong

The conventional framing of this story is a good-news event: two neighbouring clubs join hands, a football region is revived, a future opens.

I think that framing misses three things.

First, this is not a partnership between equals. It is a relationship between a party that owns an asset and a party that needs one. Calling it cooperation is formally correct but obscures the fact that one side can walk away at any time and the other cannot.

Second, a shared stadium does not automatically ease tension between two supporter groups. It creates more contact points. More contact points mean more chances of friction. Unless security is designed seriously, this arrangement could inadvertently raise risk rather than lower it.

Third, and most importantly, the language of the agreement describes intentions, not outcomes. Youth development is an intention. Sports tourism is an intention. Market expansion is an intention. Commercial partnership is an intention. None of those intentions pays the stadium's electricity bill.

A microphone stumble in 2026 did not silence me; it taught me to listen before writing. What I hear in stories like this is that the hard part has not begun. The easy part — the meeting, the handshake, the photograph — is done. At this tier, an optimistic announcement is a media product with its own value. It helps a club hold the attention of government, prospective sponsors and supporters. There is nothing wrong with that. It simply needs to be read as the right kind of document.

The risks most worth tracking

Three risks emerge once the story is examined closely.

Personnel risk. The arrangement is tied to three specific individuals: an initiating advisor, two chief executives, one of whom is also a serving government official. Changing one person could change everything. This risk never appears in the league table, but it determines whether the structure survives.

Security risk. A shared stadium plus a history of tension between supporter groups is a combination that requires professional management. At regency level, security resources are usually thin. A small incident can trigger disciplinary measures from the competition organiser — fines, partial stadium closures, even neutral-venue fixtures. Any of those hits both clubs' budgets directly.

Financial sustainability risk. No figures have been published. For an arrangement whose main value lies in unrealised commercial opportunities, the endurance of both parties depends on cash already in hand. If either club suffers a mid-season financial shock — common at this level — the agreement could unravel just when Persikotas needs the ground most.

What to watch next

I will not judge this agreement by what it announces. I will judge it by what follows.

First, the document. A memorandum with a term, tenancy clauses, a revenue-sharing mechanism and a named person accountable for delivery. When those appear, the story moves from announcement to operation.

Second, player movement. Over one or two seasons, count how many young players travel from Persikotas to PSGC, in what form, and how many come back. That number will describe the partnership's nature more clearly than any press release.

Third, the stands. Average attendance at Galuh Stadium for Persikotas home fixtures is the most honest indicator of whether the club truly has a home. If the stands stay empty, every agreement on paper is meaningless.

Fourth, sponsorship. A regional or national sponsor signing a two-club package would confirm the arrangement's central economic hypothesis.

Fifth, security. Any incident involving both supporter groups at the shared venue signals that the hardest part of the deal is being handled badly.

I have walked through small grounds, big grounds and one stumble, learning to count rhythm with my heart. The rhythm of this story is not in the announcement date. It is in the first day of the 2026/27 season, when Persikotas walks out at Galuh Stadium as the home side on someone else's ground.

That will be the real moment. Everything before it is only a prelude.

I write for those who stay in the dressing room after the stadium lights go out. In Ciamis the lights are not yet on. But the groundskeeper has already begun his work, and somewhere in this regency an eighteen-year-old is wondering whether he will get to play on that grass next season. The answer to him is not in any press release.