Point Deduction vs Stadium Sanctions: Who Indonesia's Proposed League Rule Change Is Really Aimed At

A single sentence has become a large question in Indonesian football: should clubs lose points for the conduct of their supporters? On Wednesday, 21 October 2026, at a press conference at the I.League office in Menara Mandiri, Jakarta, league president director Ferry Paulus told reporters he would not rule out applying heavy sanctions such as point deductions against clubs where safety and comfort in stadiums are compromised. The current PSSI Disciplinary Code contains no such sanction, meaning a new regulation would have to be written for it to exist at all. On the surface this sounds like an honest safety initiative. On paper, though, it is a proposal to move a cost: the people who cause incidents are not the people punished, and the people punished do not fully control the incidents. This article is opening that ledger.

To understand the context, you have to hold in mind the structure of Indonesian domestic football. Since the 2026 Kanjuruhan tragedy, the pressure on league operators, police and clubs over safety management has only increased. Stadium entry gates, steward numbers, away-supporter allocations, ticket identity verification — all of it is now politically sensitive. In that environment the league operator has two tools: fines, or point deductions. The problem with fines is that they are not an effective deterrent in the Indonesian market. A fine of a few tens of millions of rupiah is small relative to a season budget, and in some cases small relative to the value of a single league position. Ferry Paulus himself said he wants to lean toward heavy sanctions. That is an admission: the current system is not working. The question, though, is who bears the cost when a system that does not work is replaced.

A point deduction is a different kind of sanction because it is binary. A fine is a running cost — a line item a club can plan for, amortise, absorb. A point deduction is not. One incident can end a club's title race, its continental slot, or its survival fight. At many top-flight Indonesian clubs a large share of revenue comes from central distribution, sponsor activation and owner injections; equity buffers are thin. For such a club a point deduction is not merely a sporting loss — it hits prize money, distribution tiers and sponsorship terms directly. The sanction looks sporting, but the wound is financial.

This is where the central misalignment appears. In Ferry Paulus's framing, the problem is created by "rogue supporters" — elements inside organised supporter groups, and in some cases uncontrolled crowds outside the stadium perimeter. But the sanction being proposed falls on the club. Can a club genuinely control those incidents? A club that does not own its stadium — where gates, perimeter and security rings sit with police and state agencies — has a different ceiling of control than a club that runs its own venue. Applying the same sanction to both types of club becomes in effect a regressive rule, in which the club with weaker operational capacity is hurt more.

The second problem is the standard of evidence. The league director says the environment has improved — more women and children now attend stadiums. That is a demographic observation, not an incident metric. There is no count of clashes, no arrest statistics, no steward-to-spectator ratio, no incident log for away blocks. Yet the same statement says rogue supporters still threaten match safety. Both statements can be true at once, but without quantification that cannot be verified. The divergence here is not a data-results divergence but a messaging divergence — and my job as a journalist is to identify it, not to resolve it.

The biggest invisible question is: what was the triggering incident. Ferry Paulus said there were "indications of riots that have occurred" — meaning something happened. But the reporting names not a single one. Which match, which stadium, which club, which day — none of it is specified. That silence is itself the loudest signal. When a proposal is floated at a press conference without a written PSSI statement attached, it is usually not a policy announcement — it is expectation testing. The operator wants to see where resistance forms and where support forms.

Two possible outcomes follow. The first: PSSI stalls on the proposal, because organised supporter groups are large voting blocs in Indonesian football association politics. The second: the sanction is adopted, but as a mix of fines and point deductions, with point deductions reserved for extreme cases. The second is more likely, because a mixed regime lets the operator look tough while not entirely dismissing club opposition.

Clubs will probably counter-propose financial guarantees or bonds instead of point deductions. That is, money deposited would be forfeited if incidents occur, but sporting results would remain untouched. The advantage of that structure is that it preserves sporting integrity while retaining financial pain. For the league operator it would not be hard to accept, because the original goal was to create a deterrent — not a particular type of punishment.

There is another layer that is almost absent from the discussion: the transfer of security costs. A point-deduction regime normally arrives alongside tighter stewarding, ticket identity requirements and cost-sharing for policing. These are direct operating costs for clubs, with no corresponding new revenue line. The club therefore spends more and carries more risk — while holding none of the decision-making power.

As a journalist my interest lies less in the morality of this proposal than in the structure of its accounting. Fines are not enough — that recognition matters, and Ferry Paulus is honest about it. But the fact that fines are not enough does not make point deductions reasonable, unless it can be shown that point deductions actually reduce incidents. Outside Indonesia the precedent is mixed. Italy has deducted points for racist supporter conduct, but that was punishment, not prevention — and it did not stop the incidents. Where such rules have worked, they came with ticket ID, biometric gates and steward training investment. The sanction was the last layer, not the first.

This is the weakest point of the proposal: the punishment has been discussed, the operational investment has not. How many stewards are needed, at what cost, paid by whom — none of that came out at the press conference. Without those answers, a point deduction is a symbolic measure that makes the operator look tough without changing the environment inside the stadium.

My own experience says the real test of this kind of policy comes after the first incident, not at the announcement. In 2026, when the stadiums were empty, I watched how contract clauses that existed on paper were applied differently in practice — who pushed, who conceded, who stayed silent. This proposal will face the same test. If point deductions fall only on small clubs, while the same incident at a big club's stadium ends in a fine, then this rule will never improve safety — it will only expose the map of power.

The next step will be decided in front of PSSI's disciplinary committee, and how quickly it arrives depends on how quickly the next incident happens. My estimate: the league operator will draft a regulation, it will go to consultation with clubs, and the final version will keep point deductions only for a narrow set of offences — particularly banned items entering stadiums and physical clashes, which clubs can plausibly verify. Everything else gets fines and stadium closures.

The question, in the end, is this: if a league pushes the responsibility for its safety problem onto clubs while withholding the tools of control, that is not an attempt to buy safety — it is a way of dodging liability. And in any ledger, you can always see who pays the money, and who only signs.