Herdman's 25-Man Gamble: Rizky Eka Called Up, PSM Makassar Pays the Price Mid-Season

"Data does not lie, but the people who provide the data do."

On 22 September 2026, the media office of PSM Makassar issued a short line of confirmation. Rizky Eka Pratama had left Jakarta to join the Indonesian national team. There was no press conference. There was no statement from the Football Association of Indonesia (PSSI). There was not a single sentence from head coach John Herdman himself. There was only club media officer Sulaiman Abdul Karim confirming it, and a number that quietly closed a four-day sequence: Indonesia now had 25 players.

I sat in front of that news feed for a long time. Not because the event was big. But because the way it was brought into the light told a different story — a story about the order of information, about who knew before whom, and about a player leaving his club mid-season to serve a tournament whose organisers could not even agree on its name. I do not write from emotion. I write from minutes, statements of account, and the things people try to hide.

One quiet afternoon in Binh Duong, I reopened three announcements sitting side by side on my screen. On 18 September, Indonesia had 23 players. On 20 September, defender Shayne Pattynama of Persija Jakarta was added. On 22 September, left winger Rizky Eka Pratama of PSM Makassar joined. Three actions in four days. Three times Herdman personally named a player. And an information vacuum so wide that its echo was louder than the event itself.

People say girls know nothing about football. I say: go read a financial report first, then continue talking. There is no financial report here to read, but there is a registration list, a source list, and a deceptively simple question: what is really happening behind the number 25?

Nine years ago, in 2026, when I was 17 and a first-year economics student, I cross-checked a club's published financial report against the second-division table. I found the club received 12.4 billion dong in annual sponsorship while its players had gone four months unpaid. My article that night drew hundreds of mocking comments. I did not delete it. I simply attached a scanned copy of the audit document. The lesson I have kept ever since is not "always attack", but "evidence comes before emotion". With the Indonesian national team story, I did exactly that: opened the data sheet first, left emotion for later.

Context: a tournament cycle accelerating

Indonesia is entering preparation for a regional tournament — and in the recorded source material, the name appears twice in two different forms. One source calls it the "FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026". Another source calls it the "AFF Cup 2026". Both sit within 2026. This is not a trivial detail. It is the first sign that the information quality of the entire story needs to go under a magnifying glass.

What is certain is this: the Southeast Asian regional championship run by the ASEAN Football Federation (AFF) has long been a stage where Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore treat each other as direct rivals. In this cycle, the two opponents explicitly linked to Rizky Eka are Vietnam and Singapore. Not a distant Western side. Not a meaningless friendly. This is the regional arena, where a wide player's piece of skill can decide the standing of an entire football nation for two years.

As the source presents it, Herdman intervened in the squad list three times in four days. On 18 September, the starting list had 23 players. On 20 September, Shayne Pattynama of Persija Jakarta was added. On 22 September, Rizky Eka Pratama of PSM Makassar joined. Two players, two different lines, two of the largest clubs in the archipelago.

The only comparison the source offers is Singapore. It states that Singapore also registered 25 players. This detail is placed right beside the Indonesian squad number — a subtle expectation-anchoring move, as if the author is telling the reader: "Don't worry, your team is doing the same".

On the man himself: Rizky Eka Pratama started all three of PSM Makassar's opening matches in the 2026/2027 Super League. He has one assist in a 3-3 draw. This is not his first call-up under Herdman — he featured in matches against Vietnam and Singapore in an AFF Cup cycle this same year. He is described as a young player, a rising attacking option for Indonesian football.

I have followed Indonesian national-team bulletins long enough to know that a call-up in Southeast Asia is never only about football. It is a signal about the football supply chain: which club is producing players, which federation controls the information, and who is paying for whom.

Analysis: this is a positional move, not a tactical overhaul

The most important thing to state plainly from the outset: the article names a position — left winger — but describes no tactical system. No formation. No role instructions. Not a single number for xG, xGA or PPDA to analyse. That means we can legitimately draw only one conclusion: Herdman is reinforcing depth in wide attack, not restructuring the style of play.

In the language of an auditor: this is an additional entry in the same ledger. Not the opening of a new account.

The selection carries the mark of "form plus familiarity", not "novelty". Rizky Eka started all three of PSM's opening games. He has played under Herdman before. He has faced Vietnam and Singapore. He is a system-familiar, match-fit option with low integration cost — a labour contract the selector does not need two weeks to teach how to move.

I recall the lesson of Croatia at the 2026 World Cup. While everyone praised their high pressing, I calculated that they ran an average of 118 km per match, 14 km more than their opponents, yet their shooting rate after the 80th minute was only 9 percent. That article was rejected. Croatia beat Russia on penalties, then collapsed against England in the semi-final when their energy ran dry. What I learned was not "I am always right", but that "the forgotten numbers tend to sit exactly where the crowd's emotion refuses to look". With the Rizky Eka story, the forgotten number is this: no injury was reported to explain the late addition.

If there is no injury, what is the logic of raising the squad from 23 to 25 in four days?

There are two plausible hypotheses. First, Herdman is maximising the registration pool ahead of a compulsory cut. Second, he is hedging against unreported availability concerns. In either case, the behaviour of "adding bodies rather than trimming" reveals one thing: Indonesia's left-wing position has no locked-in owner.

That is a conclusion with weight. Every time a coach keeps enlarging a list, he is usually not saying "I am strong" but "I am not sure".

There is another point to view through an economic lens: the two late additions come from PSM Makassar and Persija Jakarta, the two biggest and best-supported clubs in Indonesian football. This is classic "big-club clustering" in national-team selection: the coach takes players from the top of the media pyramid, where they have already been tested under heavy pressure. This is a selection norm, not a coincidence.

And this is the part I care about most, writing about cash flow rather than emotional flow.

Across the entire information chain, not one financial figure appears. No transfer fee. No wage. No market value. No contract. That does not mean there is no financial problem. It means the financial problem is latent — a type of cost the balance sheet does not record directly.

What is that hidden cost? It is the trade-off between club and country. PSM Makassar loses its first-choice winger right in the opening phase of the 2026/2027 Super League season — and for a club that lives by buying low and selling high, and depends on results in the table, this is no small matter. The national team captures the prestige; the club bears the asset risk. Not a single dong of compensation is mentioned in the material. This is not Herdman's fault. It is the nature of the international calendar. But it is an asymmetry, and asymmetries rarely disappear on their own.

I turned every page of the funding file, and every page smelled. Here there is no funding file to turn, but there is a blank page titled "PSM Makassar's opportunity cost". No one wants to fill in that page. A young player, starting all three opening matches, with one assist in a 3-3 draw, who has already faced two regional rivals — that is an asset sitting in the appreciation phase of the age-value curve. When an appreciating asset is removed from its home ground just as it is generating returns, the owner receives no compensation. This is a form of risk that cash-flow analysts give a technical name: transferred availability risk.

Purely tactically, this move deserves to be read in three layers. The first is selection: it is a form-plus-familiarity decision. The second is cycle: this is the "acceleration" phase of a pre-tournament news cycle, when squad bulletins carry high click value but low sporting substance. The third is structure: the big clubs supply players to the national team, the national team validates the domestic league, and the domestic league becomes the national team's recruitment stage. This is a positive feedback loop for Indonesian football.

But one detail breaks the continuity of that loop: the player was chosen not because he is at the peak of a completed competition, but because he has played three matches. Three matches. That is the entire body of professional data we have. One assist in three matches, plus one previous call-up.

The true value of a player is not in the contract, but in the forgotten numbers. The forgotten number here is that the statistical sample is far too small to conclude anything. Three matches are not enough to prove a player is ready for an international tournament. Three matches are also not enough to disprove it. What three matches do prove conclusively is this: the decision-maker is acting on short-term signals, and betting on a player at exactly the stage where every error is amplified.

Contrarian angle: the story is not on the pitch, it is in the order of information

If you read only the headline, you would think this is good news: Indonesia deepening its squad before a major tournament. But when I read the source structure closely, a different picture emerges.

The person confirming the event is not the federation. The person confirming is the club's media officer. In other words, this news leaked from club level, not from national-management level. PSSI is silent. And in football, silence is never neutral — silence is always filled with speculation.

The most striking governance question is this: is 25 players the final number? No regulatory text is cited. No cut is announced. In regional tournaments, a 25-man list is usually a preliminary list that will be trimmed before kickoff. If so, celebrating the number 25 is celebrating a temporary state.

And here is the point conventional analysis avoids: the tournament's own name is a red flag. "FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026" and "AFF Cup 2026" are two different names for the same window. If they are the same competition, the report contains a naming inconsistency. If they are two competitions, then building depth for one while the other has already been played needs explaining. In both cases, this is a source-reliability issue, not a tactical issue.

The biggest risk in this story is not whether Rizky Eka is good enough. The biggest risk is that the information has not been verified three layers deep. In my profession, a number that has not been cross-checked is like a signature without a witness. It may be right. But it has not been proven right.

There is another counter-intuitive reading: Herdman's repeated additions may not be a sign of depth and strength, but a sign of uncertainty. A coach who trusts his squad usually locks the door early. A coach who is unsure leaves it open. Four days, three additions, one silent statement from the federation — that is the portrait of a man searching for certainty, not one who has found it.

And this leads to a question no one wants to ask publicly: if 25 players is a preliminary list and will be cut, who gets cut? Who absorbs the pressure? The answer may lie with the very players just called up. Being called up is not the same as being played. Sometimes, being called up merely means being placed in a more crowded waiting room.

I do not attack people. I only read process. And the process here speaks very clearly: nothing has been settled.

There is one more thing I want to say about PSM Makassar's side, because they are the party losing out in this story and few people mention it. A club entering the opening rounds of a season, where points are priced highest, loses a starting attacker. In leagues with thin margins, where clubs survive by buying low and selling high, this is a blow to both results and asset value. If Rizky Eka performs well at the regional tournament, his price rises — but that also means bigger clubs will watch him more closely. This is the classic paradox of mid-tier clubs in developing leagues: the more successfully you nurture talent, the faster you lose it.

Football is not only 90 minutes on the pitch. The dirtiest part lies off it, where no camera points. But the most unjust part lies in the balance sheet, where no one ever reconciles the "received" column with the "borne" column.

What to watch next

There are five specific signals analysts should track in the coming weeks.

First, PSSI's squad-cut announcement. If the federation confirms a list below 25, it means the two newly called-up players are competing for a final slot, not already secured. If no announcement comes, the provisional state continues.

Second, Rizky Eka's actual minutes. A call-up is only confirmed by minutes on the pitch, not by a press line. If he does not get on, then calling him up carries a different meaning from what the headline suggests.

Third, PSM Makassar's results without Rizky Eka. This is the only way to quantify the price the club pays. Points dropped during his absence are the real invoice of this call-up.

Fourth, clarification of the tournament's name. A correction from AFF or FIFA would resolve the inconsistency between the two names in the same year. Until then, any analysis of the "2026 cycle" should sit inside quotation marks.

Fifth, Rizky Eka's own fitness and injury status. With three club matches plus national duty in the same month, fatigue accumulation is a real, if unquantified, soft risk. There is no data on his injury history in the material. That is an information gap, and I refuse to turn a gap into a safe assumption.

Conclusion: what deserves an audit is not the number 25

Every contract is an investigation. Every signature is a clue. There is no contract signed here, but there is a sign signed: the sign of a football nation operating exactly according to its cycle — clubs produce players, the national team harvests, and the federation stays silent until it is forced to speak.

What caught my attention is not that Indonesia has 25 players. It is that we learned that number through a club media officer, not through a federation document. In any system where transparency is delayed, fans are the last to know the truth, and players are the first to bear the consequences.

If there is one question to leave for the region's football administrators, it is this: when a player leaves his club mid-season to wear the national shirt, who is responsible if he returns exhausted or injured? So far, no mechanism has been written down. And in my experience, a mechanism that has not been written down usually means the burden will be quietly placed on the weakest link in the chain.

That is not a prediction. It is a model proven many times over. And any model deserves, at least once, to be audited, made transparent, and cross-checked with data — not with faith.

I have watched enough international matches to know that a play in the 88th minute is rarely only about technique. Behind it is a chain of decisions made weeks earlier, in rooms no one sees. The story of Rizky Eka, Herdman and the number 25 is the same. The action happens on the pitch. But its cause is recorded in lists, names, and the gaps people choose not to fill.

And the job of an investigative writer is to fill those gaps. Not with a declaration. With a file.