The urban planner building a football club on an empty Padang

SIFAR CITY, THE FEDERATION — In the fifth month of Sifar City's first operational year, a man named Fajar Mukti emailed the Federation Football Association with the paperwork to register Bargeland Rovers FC as a formal club. He did it himself. There was no board, no committee, no backer with a vision statement. Just a Deputy Director of Urban Development who had spent his off-hours clearing a patch of ground adjacent to Pioneer Village, talking to residents, and quietly deciding that this city needed a football club.

The registration was approved. The application to enter the lowest rung of the Federation Footballing Pyramid is pending. And Fajar, 38, who has never held a coaching licence, is now also the club's first-team manager by default because there is, as yet, no one else to do it.

Like every Sifar City resident, his past is intentionally obscured as part of the Fresh Start Agreement. What he has shared is this: he came from Utarapura, where he spent years working on urban rejuvenation in the city's middle districts. He arrived in Sifar City as part of the pioneer intake and was assigned to the City Development division, where he now works on planning and designing Pioneer Village.

He is also, by his own admission, a man who simply loves football.

"When I came here, I wanted to play," he says, standing at the edge of the Padang on a late afternoon, the wind towers of Pioneer Village visible over the low roofline behind him. "I wanted to watch a match on a Saturday. I wanted something here that felt like mine. I think other people did too."

The early signs are encouraging. Workers from different shifts and different backgrounds have turned up for kickabouts, and to watch. "More people than I expected," he says. "I think people were waiting for someone to start something."

Priya Nair, who has covered grassroots football for this publication for more than fifteen years, raises the questions Fajar's optimism tends to skip over. "There's a version of this story that's genuinely exciting — a resident-founded club in a city that's never had one, building itself from scratch. That's a real story. But you're also talking about people working industrial shifts in a city that is, to put it generously, still under construction. Whether residents have the time and energy to sustain a football club, week in week out, on top of everything else they're carrying."

A Sifar Ltd official, speaking without attribution, chose their words carefully. "We want Sifar City to be a home. Community wellbeing is a genuine priority, not a slogan. We are not a dictatorship where everything has to be approved by the company, but we do expect the club to operate within proper frameworks. We look forward to meeting Mr Mukti soon."

The implication is not opaque. Sifar City is a managed environment. Everything here happens within a system someone designed and someone oversees. A football club founded by a resident, on resident time, on a piece of ground that exists between the plans rather than inside them. That is a different kind of thing.

Fajar, who works inside that system every day, receives the point without entirely accepting it. "The city works because people believe in it," he says. "That belief needs places to live."

The Padang is still rough ground. The club has no kit, no confirmed fixtures, no coaching staff beyond its founder-manager. But the ground is being cleared, the paperwork is filed, and on a late afternoon at the edge of Pioneer Village, Fajar Mukti is waiting to see who shows up.