The Word 'Pendatang' Echoing Across Dipta: Shin Tae-yong, Persija, and the Story of an Outsider in a Foreign Land

In the seventeenth second of the video, what I heard most clearly was not the shout, but the silence just before it. A man in a dark shirt walked toward the technical area of Persija Jakarta, raised his hand, and then the sound broke open: 'Kamu di sini itu pendatang! Ini daerah saya.' You are an outsider here! This is my land. The clip, less than twenty seconds long, was recorded at Stadion Kapten I Wayan Dipta, Gianyar, Bali, during the match between Persija Jakarta and Java United on the third matchday of the Super League 2026-2027, on Saturday, September 19, 2026. I watched it eleven times. Not to look for more evidence, but to hear all the way to the end that echo people usually skip when they scroll past a video that is going viral.

In my profession, there is something I call the archaeology of sound. When a stadium is full, you hear the roar. When it is empty, you hear the boots. But when one man screams into the face of another that 'you are an outsider', what you hear is no longer sound. It is a way of looking at the world. And that way of looking at the world, to a Vietnamese man living in Incheon like me, is not unfamiliar at all.

The event, if told only in dry lines, is very short. After the match, a video emerged allegedly showing Achmad Resal, the Technical Director of Java United, approaching the Persija bench area and shouting those words. They were allegedly directed at Shin Tae-yong, the head coach of Persija. On Tuesday, September 22, 2026, Persija posted a message of support for him on Instagram. And in the comments, Shin Jae-won, Shin Tae-yong's son, left a line: 'Orang-orang cemburu karena kita TERLALU BAIK' — People are jealous because we are TOO GOOD.

But a decent article cannot stop there. Because inside those seventeen seconds there is a match, a team, a football nation with tens of millions of passionate fans, a fifty-five-year-old Korean man working abroad, a son who is also a professional footballer defending his father with a single comment, and one word — pendatang — carrying the full weight of history, migration, fear of the outsider, and local pride. This is the story I want to tell. Not the story of who was right or wrong in a moment of anger. But the story of the price of being an outsider, even when you are winning.

The dressing room is never silent, we are simply not still enough to hear it. I learned that at twenty-three, sitting in the corner of an Incheon United pitch, writing down the name of a young player who had just taken off his shirt in celebration and been reprimanded. But the silence I want to hear this time is in a dressing room nearly five thousand kilometres from Incheon, after a victory.

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To understand why one word can carry such weight, we have to put it back where it belongs. The Super League 2026-2027 is the first season in which Indonesian football entered a new framework, with clubs invested in differently, expectations set higher, and pressures never seen before. Persija Jakarta, the club known as Macan Kemayoran — the Kemayoran Tiger — is one of the clubs with the largest and most loyal fan bases in Southeast Asia. That name is not decoration. It is an emotional contract between a region and a team.

And Persija has started the season in a way that anyone following Indonesian football must notice. Three matches, three wins. A 1-0 win over Borneo FC. A 2-1 win over Persib in the most symbolic match in the country's football. Then a 1-0 win over Java United in Bali, the very match in which that video was recorded. Nine points from three rounds, a defence that conceded only one goal, and a Korean man sitting on the bench, not smiling much, not overreacting.

To someone who has followed Shin Tae-yong for more than a decade like me, this is easy to recognise. He belongs to the type of coach who does not live through expression. He lives through structure. When he led the South Korea national team at the 2026 World Cup in Russia, people remember the 2-0 win over Germany, one of the biggest shocks in the tournament's history. Kim Young-gwon and Son Heung-min scored. But the way his team won that match is what matters: patient, compact, waiting, and unleashing the decisive blow at the right moment. That is Shin Tae-yong's DNA.

Indonesian football, for many years, was a symphony of explosion. Blazing stands, surging emotions, matches decided by a single individual's flash of brilliance. Shin Tae-yong arrived and brought something else: order. He taught a football culture used to chasing inspiration how to stand firm before attacking. Three wins with only one goal conceded is not coincidence. It is a system being installed, bolt by bolt.

But that system also creates a paradox. When you bring order to a place that loves chaos, you are welcomed. When you win through that order, you are worshipped. But when you win too much, through something people do not fully understand, you begin to become a threat. And a threat, in the eyes of the loser, always needs a label. That label, in Bali, on September 19, was 'pendatang'.

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Let me pause on that word a little longer, because it is at the centre of everything. In Indonesian, 'pendatang' is closest in meaning to 'newcomer', 'outsider', 'someone who came from elsewhere'. It is not exactly synonymous with 'foreigner' — 'asing' is that word. 'Pendatang' is heavier, and vaguer. It carries the memory of migrations, of resettlement programmes, of land and identity disputes. When someone shouts 'pendatang', they are not only talking about nationality. They are talking about the right to belong. About who has the right to stand on this land.

And that is why, for me, that video is not merely a football incident. It is a moment in which football accidentally exposed a deeper crack in society. Abroad, every goal is a thread tying you back home. But abroad, every time you are called an outsider, that thread is also pulled taut to the point of breaking.

I was born in Vietnam and live in Korea. I know that feeling. I have stood in a supermarket in Incheon and heard someone behind me, in a voice not even trying to be quiet, say that foreigners are taking jobs from locals. I have learned to smile at remarks like that, so as not to think about them at night. That word 'pendatang' echoing across Dipta that day, to me, was not unfamiliar. It was simply shouted louder, on camera, and by a man in a position that should have kept him composed.

And how did the man on the receiving end, Shin Tae-yong, react? He did not react. Not one retort from him was recorded. Not one angry gesture. He went on directing the match, signed the paperwork, and left the pitch. For an ordinary person, that might be endurance. For a coach, it is a skill honed over thirty years on the touchline. But for a foreigner working in a country that is not his own, it is also a calculation: you know that if you react, the story will instantly be told a different way. The outsider is not permitted to be angry. Only the native has that right.

That is a quiet injustice only those who have been outsiders truly understand. And perhaps that is also why the person who responded most forcefully for Shin Tae-yong was his son.

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Shin Jae-won is a professional footballer. He is not an unknown son sitting at home watching his father on television and typing a few indignant lines. He understands this profession, understands its price, understands what people endure backstage. And when Persija posted its message of support for Shin Tae-yong on Instagram on September 22, Shin Jae-won left a short comment: 'People are jealous because we are TOO GOOD.'

The line could be read as arrogance. But if we place it in the context of a Korean family working in football abroad, it is a statement of defence. It does not say my father is right. It says we are winning, and the loser is looking for an excuse. That is a very football way to read it. But it is also a very human way: when you cannot change being seen as an outsider, the only way to keep your dignity is to turn it into a strength.

The crowd disperses, but the roar stays in every player's eyes. And in the eyes of a son watching his father be screamed at on television, what stays is not the roar, but the scream. I think of that night in Incheon, not long ago, when I called my mother in Vietnam and told her that someone at work had said I did not belong here. My mother was silent for a moment, then said: 'Then just do it better than them.' That is the line of every immigrant mother in the world. And perhaps it is also the line Shin Jae-won heard from his father throughout the years he was growing up.

But the story does not stop at a personal reaction. Because behind Shin Tae-yong there is not only a family, but a club.

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Let us talk about Java United, to be fair to the story. Achmad Resal's team was not an ordinary team in that match. They lost 1-0, but they are part of the story. In football, pressure does not only come from a bigger club. It comes from your own shadow. When you face a team on a three-match winning streak and leading the table, you step onto the pitch with two burdens: the burden of having to win, and the burden of needing to be recognised. Every team wants recognition. And when that recognition does not come, people start looking for every reason except the football itself.

This is the blind spot of every argument like this. We look for a villain. But football does not run on villains; it runs on pressure. Achmad Resal did not scream because he is a bad man, or at least I do not have enough facts to conclude that. He screamed because he was under pressure, and in that moment he chose to express it in the easiest, crudest, and also most dangerous language: the language of native and outsider.

I have written about VAR and I will write it again here, because it is relevant. People tend to think technology will reduce controversy. It does not. It merely moves controversy from one place to another, from the referee's decision on the pitch to the review room, from one person's eye to three people's eyes. And when controversy moves, it does not disappear. It finds a new place to reside. In Bali, when what happened on the pitch was no longer enough to explain a defeat, the controversy found its way to the technical area, and hid under the shape of identity. That is what worries me most.

Because football has a strange power. In countries where people have lived for generations on one piece of land, football can become a place to express local pride. That is not bad. What is bad is when that pride, instead of being expressed in the stands, spills into the technical area and turns a defeat into a declaration of war.

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I want to return to the match, because in the seventeen seconds everyone has watched, the match was almost forgotten. And that is a guilty forgetting. Because Persija won that match deservedly with one goal, and that goal was the result of something Shin Tae-yong had been building since day one.

Imagine the match as it happened. Java United had more of the ball. They attacked on the flanks, trying to stretch Persija's defensive line. That was logical, because any team facing a side on three straight wins will have more possession. But possession is not control. Persija let their opponent hold the ball in safe zones, in horizontal areas of the pitch where no damage could be done, and waited. Waited for a misplaced pass. Waited for a moment when the opponent lost the ball and exposed a gap. And then delivered the single blow that was necessary.

It was not a beautiful match. It was a correct match. And Indonesian football, for decades, has craved this correctness more than beauty. Because beauty does not bring points. Correctness brings points. Shin Tae-yong arrived and taught this football nation that a team can win without being spectacular. To a football culture used to selling itself to emotion, that is a revolution. And like every revolution, it creates fervent supporters and unforgiving opponents.

Across Persija's three wins, there is a striking common thread I want to record: they never allowed an opponent to equalise after taking the lead. Against Borneo FC, they led 1-0 and held. Against Persib, they won 2-1, a match with many twists, and held their advantage in the second half. Against Java United, they led 1-0 and took it home. Three matches, three leads, three times not pulled back. That is the mark of a tight defence and a cold head. That is the mark of a coach who knows what he is doing.

And that is precisely why the verbal attack in Bali hurt more than it appears. If Persija had lost, people would say they are weak. But Persija won. And when a team wins by not giving you a chance, the only thing left to blame is not the team, but the person of the coach. The argument no longer sits in tactics. It leaves the pitch, and goes looking for a target.

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Now let me speak about what I consider the biggest blind spot in how the public received this event.

When a video goes viral, the first thing people do is pick a side. One side is Shin Tae-yong, symbol of professionalism, a talented foreigner treated unfairly. The other is Achmad Resal, the rude man, the one who used the language of identity to attack. The line has been drawn. Everyone just needs to step to one side. But the real story is not that clean.

The biggest problem here is not one angry man. The problem is that we, once again, used the language of native and outsider to explain a football defeat. And that is not a personal matter. It is a pattern. A pattern that appears in many countries, many football nations, whenever a foreigner succeeds: sooner or later, his success will be reduced to luck, to favouritism, to the fact that he came from elsewhere and understands nothing about 'us'. Words like 'pendatang' are the tip of that iceberg. The submerged part is a football culture that sometimes does not allow a newcomer to become family, no matter how much he has contributed.

There is a truth about Southeast Asian football I have observed over sixteen years in this profession. Here, football is part of collective identity, not just a sport. That makes it beautiful. But it also makes it vulnerable. Because when football is identity, another team winning is not merely another team winning. They are a threat to the story people tell about themselves. Shin Tae-yong is not just a coach who is winning. He is a different story being told on land that people consider their own story.

That is why I want to say that the simple views — villain and hero, the jealous and the victim — all miss the most important point. The most important point is a football nation struggling with itself. It invited outsiders to change things. But it has not learned how to treat change when that change succeeds. And that is a lesson not unique to Indonesia. It is the lesson of every developing football nation, including the homeland I have never left in my heart.

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I remember an afternoon in 2026, when stadiums around the world stood empty. I sat in the cold stands of a capital-region derby in Korea, no spectators, only the sound of boots ringing through empty space. After the match, I stayed in the dressing room and saw a veteran midfielder sitting with his head bowed. He had once been the soul of the team, now playing disjointedly, and he wept. I wrote about it, and the club arranged a psychologist for the squad. The empty stadium still echoes with the sound of two years ago.

I think of that afternoon when I watch the video in Bali. Because there is a moment in those seventeen seconds no one notices. Just before Achmad Resal opens his mouth, there is a silence. A silence in which, if a person were still enough, another choice could be made. The man chose. And that choice was recorded, spread, and became part of a story that cannot be taken back.

In my profession, I believe a journalist is not a judge. I have no right to conclude about a person's motives. I can only record what I see, and place it in context so the reader can reflect. But there is one thing I can say as an observer: words like 'pendatang', even spoken in anger, leave a mark. Not on the person they are said to, but on a whole community. Because every time such a word is shouted, it is not aimed at one person. It is aimed at everyone who, at some point in their life, has ever felt like an outsider.

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And that brings me back to Shin Jae-won. Because in this whole affair, his reaction is the detail that makes me think the most.

A professional footballer, son of a famous coach, responding to an insult against his father not with a threat or an outburst, but with a neat comparative line: 'People are jealous because we are TOO GOOD.' There is a maturity in that response, and also a confidence. But behind it, I read something else: a family that has learned to live with being seen as outsiders, and to turn it into fuel.

How did he grow up? In Korea, with a father who travelled the world working in football. Then he followed his father's path, became a player, and also went abroad to compete. Father and son understand each other in a language only football families understand. And when the father was insulted in a distant country, the son, in another distant country, replied with a comment on social media. That is how immigrant families protect each other in the twenty-first century: from afar, in words.

But I do not want to romanticise that. Because there is a harder truth: whatever Shin Jae-won says, whatever Persija posts, however many millions of fans support it, the word 'pendatang' was already shouted. And the man it was shouted at must, after all of it, go back to work in a place where he was not born. That is the reality every foreigner working abroad lives with, every day.

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Let me speak about Persija, about how the club responded. On September 22, 2026, the club posted a message of support for its coach. It was a correct action, but also a minimal one. In professional football, protecting a winning coach is easy. The harder question is: if Persija had not won its first three matches, would that message have appeared? Would the club have stood by him when results did not come?

This is not a criticism of Persija. It is a question I put to an entire football nation. Because the way a club treats an outsider when they win is very different from the way it treats them when they lose. And the true measure of a football culture is not how it treats its heroes on a fine day, but how it treats them when everything collapses.

I have followed many Korean coaches working abroad. I know that cycle. First suspicion. Then curiosity. Then admiration, when results come. Then dependence. And finally, if results stop, a turning away, far faster than the speed at which they were welcomed. With Shin Tae-yong, that cycle is only at its best stage. Three wins. But precisely because he is at the peak, he is also at his most vulnerable. Because the peak is where people begin to wait for you to fall.

And once people wait for you to fall, they will start looking for reasons. The easiest reason, once again, is usually origin. Not ability. Not tactics. But that you came from elsewhere. I fear that in this 2026-2027 season, we will hear this story many more times, at many different stadiums.

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Now I want to say something that may displease some people, and I say it as a lover of Southeast Asian football.

We often take pride in the passion of Southeast Asian football. Packed stands. Fluttering flags. Drums throughout the match. It is a beauty Europe lost long ago. But that passion has a dark side, and the dark side is not what happens in the stands. It is what happens at the edge of the pitch, in the technical area, where the emotions of a grown, responsible adult can turn into an insult rooted in identity. And when that happens, we need to call it by its proper name, without excuses.

There is a difference between understanding why a person does something wrong and forgiving the wrong. I understand why a technical director can lose his composure after a late defeat. I understand how pressure can turn a polite man into a rude one in seconds. But understanding does not mean acceptance. Football can be a battle of emotions, but it should not be a battle of identities. Once we drag identity in, we are no longer talking about a match. We are talking about the right to belong. And the right to belong is not something to be argued over on the touchline.

Perhaps the best thing Indonesian football can do after this event is not to punish an individual. It is to ask the question: why, after so many years of inviting talented outsiders to raise the level of the game, do we still react to their success with the word 'pendatang'? The answer lies somewhere deeper than a defeat. It lies in how a football nation tells the story about itself.

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And here, I want to take a moment to talk about how stories of outsiders get told.

In my career, I have reported on eight Olympic Games, eight World Cups, and several editions of the Giro d'Italia and Tour de France. I have travelled through many countries, met many fan communities. And I have realised one thing: wherever there are people far from home, there is a community trying to belong. In Korea, I have seen Vietnamese people gather in a small restaurant in Incheon to watch the Korean national team play, even though they are not Korean. They cheer. They cry. They debate tactics. They want to be part of the story.

In Indonesia, with its millions of football fans, there are probably similar communities. Koreans, Vietnamese, Japanese, people from everywhere who came and live there. They watched the match between Persija and Java United. They may have celebrated Persija's goal, or objected, or simply sat quietly. But when the word 'pendatang' echoed back, I wonder how they felt.

Because that is what events like this do. They are not only about a coach being insulted. They tell every outsider watching: this is what can happen to you, no matter what you have done, no matter how much you have contributed. And when a football nation says that to a community of fans, it is losing part of its audience. A part it will find hard to win back, because trust, once wounded, does not recover as quickly as form on the pitch.

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I want to return to the detail I mentioned at the start: the silence before the shout.

In those seventeen seconds, the silence lasted only a fraction of a second. But it is a fraction of a second that could have changed everything. If, in that fraction, the man had chosen silence, we would not have this story. No viral video. No response from Persija. No comment from Shin Jae-won. Just a 1-0 defeat, written into the record, and the season continuing.

But he did not choose silence. And I think there is a lesson there for all of us who work in football. The moment between emotion and action is the most important moment. That is where we define who we are. On the pitch, a player has a fraction of a second to decide whether to shoot or pass. On the touchline, an adult has a fraction of a second to decide whether to speak or stay silent. And both decisions are recorded, one in the scoreline, one in history.

I am a writer about football, not a moralist. But I believe football, like every sport, is a way for people to learn to live together. And if that is true, then every time someone chooses to call another person an outsider, we have lost a match that is not recorded on the scoreboard. A match in which no one wins, and all of us lose.

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So, after all of this, what will happen next?

This is where I have to talk about internal signals, because I am someone who follows a team, not a distant commentator.

The first signal comes from Persija itself. A team on three straight wins could choose to hide, stay silent, and let the story pass. Instead, they chose to speak. That is a signal. But the real signal will come in the next match, when the cameras point at Shin Tae-yong in the technical area. Nothing will change on his face. He will go on directing, correcting, adjusting. That is his nature. But inside, perhaps he has recorded something in his notebook. Not for revenge. But to understand where he is, and among whom.

The second signal comes from the fans. After an event like this, the stands usually react in one of two ways. One is stronger support, turning Shin Tae-yong into a symbol of integrity. Two is indifference, letting the story sink like every other story on social media. How the Persija stands react in the next home match will tell us what this story truly means to them. If they sing his name more, the event has created something far beyond an argument. If they only cheer when the team wins, the event will fade away.

The third signal comes from the league organisers. The Super League 2026-2027 will have to decide whether this is a private matter between two people, or a problem for the entire competition. An identity-based insult in the technical area is not a yellow card. It is a question about standards of conduct. How the league answers this question will shape how the next foreigners are treated. And that matters to more than forty million people who only watch football, and do not work in it.

And finally, a signal comes from overseas Vietnamese fans, people like me. We live in places we were not born in. We work in places where we are sometimes called outsiders. We follow football as a way to tie a thread back home. An event like the one in Bali reminds us that football is a mirror. It reflects not only what is beautiful, but also what we still have to learn. And if we keep watching, keep writing, keep retelling, then we are doing the work of bridge-builders, not wall-builders.

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Four years ago, I sat in a beer hall in Incheon, on a rainy night, and called a friend in Russia. I held up my phone to the sky so he could hear forty Korean fans roaring. That match, Korea beat Germany 2-0 but were still eliminated from the World Cup. People criticised the team. But in the beer hall, no one criticised anyone. They just cheered, and were sad, and drank. And I wrote that a victory sometimes only means something when you share it with others.

In Bali, ten months ago, one man shouted a word. But in Incheon, six years ago, a group of strangers roared for a team that was not their home team. Both are football. Both are human. And I still choose to believe that the second thing — the thing that lets someone far from home cheer for something — is why we love this sport.

The event in Gianyar will pass. The video will be buried by another video. Shin Tae-yong will keep leading Persija. Shin Jae-won will keep playing football somewhere far away. Achmad Resal will keep doing his job. And I will keep writing, from Incheon, about people working in football far from home. Because that is my own story, even when I tell it through football.

But if there is one thing I want to leave behind, it is this: a mature football nation is not one that never has controversy. It is one that knows how to answer controversy without turning a person into an outsider. When we learn that, we will not need to ask who is a 'pendatang'. Because in football, the only person who truly belongs is the one standing on the pitch for something larger than themselves.