PSM Makassar

The wait ran to twenty-three years. When PSM Makassar took the 2022–23 Liga 1 title, the club had not won the top of Indonesian football since the 1999–2000 season, and Bernardo Tavares, who managed the side to that championship, ended a long wait. Four years earlier, under Darije Kalezić, the club had already broken a different drought by lifting the Piala Indonesia in 2019. Further back sit five championships from the old Perserikatan league, won across 1957, 1959, 1965, 1966 and 1992, spanning the decades when Indonesian football was still organised around regional amateur sides rather than a national professional tier.

No player is tied to PSM Makassar the way Andi Ramang is. He played for the club from 1947 to 1960, and the nickname Pasukan Ramang, Ramang's Squad, still attaches to the team rather than to any successor.

Matches against Persija Jakarta carry the weight of that history, a rivalry known simply as the Jakarta–Makassar fixture. Against Malut United, the contest is framed differently, as the Eastern Indonesia Red Derby, a contest between clubs from the same part of the archipelago.

The academy set up around 2017 has already fed the national team, sending through Asnawi Mangkualam among others. Home matches are now played some distance from the city, at the Gelora B.J. Habibie Stadium, since the demolition of the old Mattoangin ground in 2020.