Children's League: Bigger, Better

April 1, 2001

Indonesian children's football league will start its kick off today, Sunday (4/1). This league will be sponsored by television channel SCTV, Porgaki Foundation, and Campina Ice Cream Co.; thus, the league is called Ligana (Children's League) Campina. The competition will take place from April 1 to July 15 2001.

The competition is much bigger than last year, this year being held in eleven cities involving 192 SSB (football schools). SCTV will air sixteen episodes of the league's highlights starting April 15 all the way through July 29 every Sunday, from 15:30 - 16:00 PM (Western Indonesian Standard Time).

Compared to last year, the number of cities the competition being held in has quadrupled to eleven. Meanwhile, the number of SSB participating in Ligana Campina has tripled to 192 compared to last year. This is indeed a good news for development of youth footballers in Indonesia.

According to SCTV press secretary Budi Darmawan, SCTV again takes part as one of the sponsors this year because the league last year was a big success.

"Besides, through Ligana Campina, SCTV wants to be consistent in supporting the development of youth football in Indonesia," explained Budi.

The same line of answer was also given by Campina's product manager Aldi R. Setiadi. The company sees that this kind of activity is the right method of developing sportmanship and friendship in children in early ages.

"By becoming the main sponsor of Ligana, we hope that we can be involved in developing children's sports in Indonesia. We also want to increase the amount of children's nutrition through various of our products," said Aldi.

Ligana Campina will use FIFA U12 rules and regulations for the competition. Such rules are the size of the field, which is 40 x 60 meters, goal's height is 2 m and its width is 5 m, match's length is 2 x 15 minutes with 10 minutes of halftime, and the ages of the players are limited to those between 8 to 12 years old. The rule of offside is omitted from Ligana.

"We're applying these rules to the competition because they're the basic concepts of developing youth football," said Taufik Jursal, the league's head of coordinators.

The 192 football schools will participate in the following eleven cities: Jakarta, Tangerang, Bogor, Bekasi, Bandung, Semarang, Solo, Yogyakarta, Malang, Sidoarjo, and Surabaya.

Played in half-competition system, all teams will play through two qualifying groups (Groups A and B) in each city. The winners of Groups A and B (24 teams) from each city will advance to regional championship, where there will be 4 regions. From this, the top two of each region (8 teams) will advance to the next round (top-eight round). This final-eight round will be played in two groups (Group X and Y). The winner of each Groups X and Y will then advance to the big final to proclaim the league title of Ligana Campina 2001.

from Ligana Campina press release