The briefing room at Persita Tangerang’s training ground is sparse. A whiteboard. Three plastic chairs. A stack of translated coaching manuals, their spines cracked from repeated reading. On the wall, a printed formation diagram — possession shapes in black marker, transition arrows in red, the kind of board that, in its absolute clarity of presentation, you would expect to find in a Cruyffian academy in Catalonia rather than at a club competing on a fraction of a percent of Barcelona’s annual budget.
Hendri Susanto, 34, became head coach of Persita Tangerang eighteen months ago with no scouting department, no video analyst, and a playing budget that would cover approximately three weeks of a League One player’s wages in England.
He has, in that time, built one of the most structurally coherent pressing systems in Indonesian Liga 1 — working entirely from first principles, coaching manuals, and hours of self-recorded video analysis on a second-hand laptop. I spent four days at his training ground in early March 2026, and what I saw was the kind of coaching education the European football world claims it can only deliver inside multi-million-euro institutional structures. Susanto is doing it without those structures. The case for paying attention to what he has built is, on the evidence, urgent.
The System
Susanto’s team plays a 4-3-3 in possession that collapses into a 4-5-1 without the ball. The shape is recognisably Cruyffian in its demand for positional discipline — each player is assigned a zone, not a man, and the collective shape takes priority over individual defensive duels.
“We don’t chase players,” Susanto explains, through a translator. “We chase the ball into zones. If you are not in your zone, the system breaks.”
The press triggers off two cues: the ball moving from a centre-back to a fullback, or the fullback receiving with their back to the touchline. At the moment of either, the ball-side wide forward sprints to engage, the ball-side central midfielder jumps into the half-space, and the back four slides ten metres laterally to compress the opposition’s wide channel. The result, when the press fires correctly, is a 4v3 in the opposition’s defensive third within four seconds of the trigger pass.
When the press is broken — and Persita’s quality limits how often it can be sustained for ninety minutes — the team retreats into a tightly-organised 4-5-1 mid-block. The wide forwards drop to the wide midfield positions; the centre-forward (a 26-year-old veteran of the Indonesian second division named Reza Pratama, who is, on the field evidence, the most under-rated press-leader in his generation of South-East Asian footballers) takes his post at the top of the central zone; the back four sits roughly twenty-five metres from goal, daring the opposition to play through them.
The structural sophistication of the shape is, given the playing standard, surprising. The discipline is not, on inspection, the result of elite player decision-making — Persita’s squad is, at the technical level, mid-table by Liga 1 standards. The discipline is the product of the coaching. Susanto has rehearsed every transition pattern in extended training sessions until the players’ positional choices have become automatic. The system is doing the heavy lifting that, in Europe, would be done by both the system and the player quality.
Building Without Resources
In the absence of professional analysts, Susanto records training sessions and matches on a phone mounted on a selfie stick at the side of the pitch. He reviews footage each evening, often until after midnight, identifying patterns and preparing corrections for the next session. The phone is a mid-range Samsung that he bought second-hand. The mount is a £4 plastic clip from Tokopedia. The footage is reviewed on a 2018 Lenovo laptop that occasionally requires him to restart it during analysis.
The coaching-education stack is similarly improvised. Susanto’s library, which I was permitted to photograph, consists of seventeen books in Indonesian or Bahasa Malaysia translation: Marti Perarnau’s Pep Confidential; Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid; a slim translation of Rinus Michels’s Teambuilding; an academic textbook on positional play by a Catalan coaching educator named Joaquim Aldas that Susanto considers the most important book in his collection; an English-language original of Tim Lees’s The Coaching Handbook that he has annotated extensively in pencil; and ten others that range from Argentine man-marking manuals to Japanese sports-psychology texts.
He has read each of them at least twice. He references them by chapter and page during in-session corrections. The Aldas book in particular — which is essentially the curriculum of a Catalan coaching diploma compressed into 380 pages — is the one he describes as having “saved my career,” because it provided the systematic vocabulary he needed to describe what he was trying to teach. Coaches in Europe acquire that vocabulary through institutional pathways — UEFA Pro Licence, federation diploma courses, club-academy mentorships. Susanto acquired it through a bookstore in Jakarta and four years of solitary reading.
Player recruitment operates through a network of informal contacts — youth coaches at Liga 2 clubs, former teammates, regional tournaments held in towns the urban Indonesian football media never visits. He has never used a licensed scouting platform; he has, on his own count, attended 87 different lower-division matches in the past fifteen months, taking notes on a paper pad that he transcribes into spreadsheets later.
“You learn to see things differently when you have nothing,” he says. “You watch players in the market, on the street. You understand character as well as ability. The expensive scouting platforms tell you the technical numbers. They don’t tell you whether a player will fit in a dressing room, whether they have the discipline for a tactical system, whether they will accept being asked to play in a way that asks more of them than the previous coach did.”
The recruitment philosophy is, on his account, the closest his work gets to conventional coaching theory. He looks for technical baselines — first touch, passing accuracy under pressure, basic positional discipline — and then for what he calls karakter (character). A player with adequate technique and elite character, in his view, is a better fit for a Susanto system than a player with elite technique and uncertain character. The number of players he has signed who would have been seen as undervalued by a more conventional scouting operation is, by his accounting, eighteen out of the twenty-six players currently registered with Persita. The over-performance is the most direct evidence that the recruitment philosophy is working.
The Match That Tells the Story
In late February, Persita Tangerang travelled to play Persib Bandung — one of the four traditional Liga 1 powerhouses, with a budget approximately twelve times Persita’s, a senior squad full of national-team caps, and a twelve-point lead at the top of the table at the time of the match.
Persita lost 1-0, on a 78th-minute set-piece goal that came from the only corner Persib had won in the entire match.
The 1-0 scoreline elides the actual story. Persita had 58% possession in Persib’s half. Their xG figure was 1.4 against Persib’s 0.7. They had eleven shots to Persib’s six. The Indonesian football press, which generally treats Liga 1 results as binary outcomes, reported the match as a Persib win and moved on. The football I watched, both live and on the rewind, was a comprehensive demonstration of how a tactical system can compensate for a financial gap of more than a magnitude.
Susanto’s instructions for the match were, on the evidence of the in-session work I observed in the four days leading up to it, granular to a degree that few coaches in elite European football would attempt. Specific defensive triggers for Persib’s three principal attacking patterns. Specific instructions for the wide midfielders on how to manage Persib’s veteran left-back, who had played 38 times for Indonesia and would be the principal danger if allowed to overlap. A specific pre-rehearsed pattern for getting Persita’s centre-forward into shooting positions in a 4v3 sequence that depended on the right midfielder dropping deeper than is conventional in a 4-3-3.
The pattern was executed twice in the match. Both produced shots, neither produced goals. The set-piece in the 78th minute was the kind of marginal failure that, against a more equal financial competitor, Persita would not have been punished for. Against Persib, with their squad depth and individual quality, a single set-piece error was sufficient.
This is the texture of the Susanto project. The coaching is producing performances that, on the underlying numbers, are roughly equivalent to Persib’s; the budget is producing results that, in the table, sit nine places below them. The gap between the two — performance and result — is the gap between what the coaching is achieving and what the squad’s individual quality cannot quite cash in.
What the Indonesian Football Establishment Has Done About It
Almost nothing. The Indonesian Football Association has, in the eighteen months since Susanto took over at Persita, neither invited him to attend any federation coaching course nor offered him resources of any kind. The PSSI’s coaching education infrastructure is concentrated, by long institutional habit, on the small group of coaches who already work at the largest clubs and who have personal relationships with the federation’s senior administrators. Susanto has neither of those advantages. He coaches at a smaller club; he came up through the youth system rather than through a playing career; he is, in the terms Indonesian football administration uses, outside the network.
The Liga 1 coaching ecosystem reflects this. The five most-credentialled coaches in the league all came up through the same Jakarta-based football academies in the 1990s, attended the same federation courses in the 2000s, and arrived at top-flight management through largely-shared career paths. Susanto’s path — youth coaching in regional Java, two years as an assistant at a Liga 2 club, a head-coaching role at a smaller Liga 2 outfit, then the Persita appointment — is unconventional in a way that, even after eighteen months of demonstrably successful work, has not produced any meaningful institutional recognition.
I asked him whether this frustrates him. He answered, after a long pause, in a way that I think captures something important about the man and his work.
“My job is the players in front of me. The federation is not my job. If I do my job well enough for long enough, perhaps the federation will be interested. If they are not interested, I will keep doing my job. The work is the work.”
This is the kind of low-aspect-ratio answer that Western football journalism, addicted as it is to coaches who present themselves as charismatic narrative figures, often misses entirely. Susanto is doing the work. He is, on every measure I can find, doing it well. The institutional recognition that should be following his work has not, to date, materialised. He remains, in the quiet daily way of someone who chose his career for its content rather than its visibility, focused on the next training session.
What His Story Proves
Susanto’s story is not exceptional in the way Klopp or Guardiola are exceptional. He will probably never coach in Europe. He will probably never have the resources to fully implement the system he has in his head. The Persita budget is unlikely to expand by a factor that would let him recruit the kind of squad his coaching is built for; the Indonesian football economy is unlikely to grow at a rate that would shift the structural constraints of his career. He is forty-some-percent of the way through a coaching life that the Western football world will, almost certainly, continue to ignore.
But what he has built — with nothing — is a reminder that tactical intelligence does not require infrastructure. It requires clarity of idea and relentless application. Football is full of coaches like Susanto. It rarely writes about them. The football journalism industry’s institutional incentives — to cover the leagues with the largest broadcast contracts, to interview the coaches with the largest social-media followings, to chase the narratives that translate into the most-shared content — produce a coverage map that almost entirely ignores the work happening at his level of the sport. The map is wrong. The work happening at his level is, in its way, more sophisticated than much of the work that gets the front-page coverage in Europe.
I have, in twelve years of covering Asian football, met perhaps fifteen coaches like Susanto — working in conditions Western elite-football coaches would consider impossible, producing tactical work that would not embarrass the elite coaches if anyone bothered to examine it. The institutional response, both in the football media and at the federation level, has consistently been to ignore them. The institutional response is, on every metric I can apply, wrong.
This piece is, I want to be honest, the kind of piece that does not do well by the metrics the football media uses to measure success. It will not be one of the most-shared articles on this site. It will not produce inbound coaching offers from European clubs that are reading it. The protagonist will continue, on Tuesday, to set up his second-hand phone on its plastic clip and record his next training session. The work will continue. The recognition will not, in any institutional sense that matters, follow.
I hope a small number of you will read this anyway, and consider, for a moment, what tactical football looks like when it is being coached entirely on its own merits — without the resource padding, without the institutional support, without the broadcasting interest that the coaches you usually read about have all benefited from. The football is, on its own terms, beautiful. Hendri Susanto has built it from nothing. The fact that you have not previously heard his name is, in itself, the central failure of the football journalism that purports to cover the sport globally.
If this piece does its work — and I am not optimistic — it will be the start of a longer conversation about how the football world distributes its attention. The decisions that determine which coaches get covered, which leagues get analytical depth, which countries are treated as serious football cultures and which are treated as exotic curiosities, are not made by readers. They are made by editors, broadcasters, federations, and the commercial interests that fund all three. Each of those constituencies has, in the seven years I have spent covering football across Asia for various outlets, shown a consistent reluctance to allocate resources to coaching stories outside the dominant European leagues. The reluctance is not malicious. It is institutional. It is also, in the specific case of work like Susanto’s, a failure that the football world will, eventually, look back on with the embarrassment institutional failures of attention always end up producing. I have a small file of similar coaching stories — from Vietnam, from the Philippines, from a club in Hyderabad I spent a week at in 2024 — that I have been writing about for years, with mostly limited audience response, and which I will continue to write about because the alternative is the kind of selective football journalism that pretends only Europe has tactical ideas worth recording.