Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny and How Indonesia Is Building a National Team from Historical Memory

Two pieces of paper, two dates, and one question Indonesian media will not stop asking: are these two men actually Indonesian?

In August 2026, FIFA approved Maarten Paes's application for a change of association — a goalkeeper born in 2026 who had previously worn the Netherlands U21 shirt. In February 2026, Ole Romeny took the oath to acquire Indonesian citizenship. One goalkeeper. One centre-forward. Precisely the two positions Indonesian football had spent two decades struggling to fill.

The Indonesian outlet Kompas calls them "exceptional cases" and describes the situation with a phrase that makes a reader pause: "no indigenous blood". From that moment on, the football story becomes a story about paperwork, lineage and identity — a story with no ball in play.

I follow Southeast Asian football from Shanghai, where the time difference means I usually watch regional matches later than colleagues in Hanoi and Jakarta. My job is to stay behind after the whistle, rewind the tape, and only then write. There is one interview I have never forgotten — because I asked nothing at all. The lesson from the 2026 World Cup is a simple one: the ear always goes before the pen.

This time, what I heard in the Indonesian story is not in the two names. It is in the way a federation is reading its own history back — and in the speed at which the whole region is preparing to copy it.

Southeast Asia is naturalising faster than we think

For more than a decade, Southeast Asian football lived inside a fairly stable order: Vietnam and Thailand shared the top, the Philippines and Malaysia trailed, and Indonesia sank into cycles of coaching changes and tournaments they made hard for themselves. That order was never permanent — but the way it is being broken this time comes from an unexpected direction: the civil registry.

The Philippines went early with a model built on mixed-heritage players from the US and Europe, but the output has been uneven, because supply depends on diaspora communities whose football cultures do not always match. Malaysia has recently started trying. Indonesia, however, has something nobody else in the region has at the same scale: a community descended from the Dutch East Indies colonial era, spread across the Netherlands and Europe, large enough to function as a talent mine that can be extracted with documentation rather than with contracts.

That is why the story of Maarten Paes and Ole Romeny should not be read as a single news item. It is the shape of a template.

As someone working in the region, I have to say this plainly: Vietnamese colleagues who watch Indonesia are not wrong to worry. But they are worrying in the wrong place. Most of the anxiety is directed at a legal doubt that does not, in fact, exist.

Two doors, and both were opened lawfully

To understand this, you have to strip it of identity emotion and look at two entirely separate regulatory systems that each player must pass through.

The first door is Indonesian nationality law. The naturalisation of both Paes and Romeny proceeded under Article 20 of Law No. 12/2026 — a mechanism allowing naturalisation in the national interest, conditional on approval by Indonesia's House of Representatives (DPR). This is a political process, not dry administrative procedure: the DPR has to meet, vote, and answer to voters for granting someone citizenship. Paes completed his part in April 2026; Romeny took his oath in February 2026.

The second door is FIFA's system of international eligibility. For Romeny, this was a routine confirmation. For Paes, it was considerably more complex, because he had already represented the Netherlands at U21 level. A player who has represented one federation at youth level may switch federations only once in his career, through the change-of-association mechanism. FIFA approved Paes's case in August 2026. According to Indonesian press reporting, the Football Association of Indonesia (PSSI) pursued Paes's file very persistently over a long period before the outcome arrived.

The core point most regional commentary skips: FIFA does not ask whether a player has indigenous blood. FIFA asks where the player's biological grandparent was born. The "substantial connection" criterion in the FIFA Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes is designed to establish a territorial link, not to measure ancestry. Paes clearly passed that criterion. So did Romeny.

Both men belong to what researchers call the "blijvers" — descendants of European settlers in the Dutch East Indies, holding Dutch nationality, with no indigenous genetic lineage, but with ancestors born on territory that is today Indonesia. For FIFA, that is enough. For Indonesian law, it is also enough, once the DPR has nodded.

In other words, both Paes and Romeny walked through two independent doors, and neither door has been shaken.

Why goalkeeper and centre-forward

This is where should pause a little longer, because it shows PSSI did not pick names at random.

In football, the two positions with the highest capacity to single-handedly change a result are goalkeeper and centre-forward. A top-class goalkeeper can turn three potential defeats into three draws, and a draw into a win. A centre-forward can turn a match in which his team creates nothing into a 1-0 victory. Wide players, box-to-box midfielders and full-backs matter too, but their impact is fragmented and far more dependent on the system around them.

Maarten Paes was born in 2026, meaning he is in the most mature phase of a goalkeeper's career — and it is worth remembering that peak goalkeeper years extend considerably later than those of a winger or a midfielder. A stable first-choice goalkeeper has a particularly strong effect on national teams, where a back line rarely gets enough shared time to build familiarity. In that context, a permanent goalkeeper becomes the anchor of the whole system.

But I have to be honest: this is inference from playing position, not a conclusion from data. Across all the sources I have, there is not a single metric — no xG, no PPDA, no possession share, no FIFA ranking points before and after — that quantifies the claimed "strength uplift". Indonesian media assert that the naturalisation movement has clearly made the team stronger. That may be true. But it is asserted, not measured.

I checked this several times before writing that line. A player occupying a high-leverage position does not automatically generate that leverage on the pitch.

The cost is not a transfer fee

This is the most interesting part economically, and the most misunderstood.

Seen through the lens of the club transfer market, acquiring a European-based goalkeeper and a European forward at a transfer cost of zero looks like a fantasy deal. No fee, no release clause, no bidding war with any club. But concluding that Indonesia is getting talent for free is entirely wrong.

The real cost sits in three other layers. The first is administrative and legal cost: files, vetting, a parliamentary process, and — for Paes specifically — the entire effort of convincing FIFA to approve a change of association for a player with youth international history. The second is political cost: every time the DPR votes to grant citizenship to a player without indigenous blood, the federation takes on a credibility debt, and that debt comes due the moment the national team loses a match that matters. The third is opportunity cost: resources poured into hunting diaspora files are resources not poured into domestic academies.

Put differently, Indonesia's naturalisation model is an investment of political capital that pays returns in points on the pitch, not a free contract.

The structural problem lies here: supply. The entire model rests on a population created by a single historical event — the Dutch East Indies colonial period. That population is finite, non-renewable, and ages with each generation. Every naturalised descendant is a spent vote. If the pool of eligible players one day runs dry in the Netherlands, Indonesia will be forced back to doing precisely what it is currently setting aside: developing youth at home.

None of the sources I have mentions this limit. It is the biggest gap in the entire debate.

The contrarian angle: "legal loophole" is the wrong phrase

This is where I want to stand apart from most regional commentary.

The phrase used most often in pieces about Paes and Romeny is "legal loophole". It implies Indonesia found a crack, that something is not quite right, that a close reading of the law would tell a different story. That reading sounds sharp, but it is technically wrong on the law.

The grandparent-born-on-territory criterion is not a bug in FIFA's system. It is a designed rule. It exists because football is a sport with extraordinarily high migration and historical density — because federations have long accepted that a connection to a football nation can come from ancestral territory, not only from birthplace. The system Paes and Romeny used is the same system hundreds of players in Africa, Oceania and Europe have used entirely normally for decades. It only draws attention when the protagonists are Southeast Asian.

The difference between the two things is vast. Exploiting a loophole is an act carrying legal risk and subject to being closed. Using a designed pathway is an act with precedent, with standards, and with repeatability. Indonesia is doing the second.

What deserves debate is not legality. What deserves debate is sustainability — and here, regional coverage also drifts when it turns the story into an identity survey. The question "does this player have Indonesian blood" is an emotional question. The question "is this player eligible to play under the rules" is a professional question, and it has been answered.

To put it the way someone who watches stands rather than statutes would: the drumbeat is not in the referee, it is in the breathing of the fans. And that breathing is currently split in two. Half the stands in Jakarta want to see the national team win now; the other half want to see a team they recognise themselves in. Public pressure sits at a medium level, but it does not fade with time — it accumulates.

What is notable is that PSSI, after all this, has shown impressive operational capacity. It navigated two different legal systems, in two different countries, with two different veto-holding bodies, and closed both files in under a year. Underestimating that capacity is a strategic mistake.

But strong execution does not mean correct strategic vision. This model substitutes for youth development rather than complementing it. Players who came up through domestic academies — the group I would call the compressed generation — are steadily losing their pathway to the national team. In a squad, every naturalised player's place is a place that no longer exists. That is an invisible cost in the short term and a very visible one in the long term.

And there is one more layer, which I consider the biggest risk even though it is the least discussed: both Paes and Romeny carry a reputational load far larger than their positions. They have been placed at the centre of a policy story. If they play well, the success will be credited to an entire model. If they go quiet in a big match, that failure will also be blamed on the whole model. It is the kind of burden no player should carry, and it is an asymmetric risk: one failure will cause more damage than the combined benefit of the two current successes.

Vietnam seen from here

For Vietnamese football, this is a direct competitive signal, and it should not be read as news about Indonesia.

Vietnam does not have a diaspora pool of the same scale and the same developed football culture as Indonesia. Vietnamese migration history is structurally different: the overseas Vietnamese community is large, but much of it sits in countries that do not produce elite footballers, and the number of players from that community who have been properly trained at European level is smaller still. In other words, supply is narrower and conversion from file to national team is slower.

That forces Vietnam to compete on a different path: development and cohesion. It is slower, less rewarded by media coverage, but more durable and impossible to invalidate by a decision from Zurich. What is worth tracking is whether the Vietnam Football Federation comes under pressure to accelerate along the naturalisation route.

That is a question with real consequences. If all of Southeast Asia shifts to a naturalisation model, the value of that advantage dilutes very quickly for everyone. When the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia all tap the same supply of overseas-finished talent, we get a race nobody wins, while the youth-development layer across the region is left behind. This is a systemic risk I can see from a professional standpoint.

I put two test questions to myself before finishing this piece. First: am I overstating my own observational effort to read a trend that does not yet exist? Second: am I pushing the focus so far onto legal detail that I lose the actual football? The answer to the second put me at ease: in this case there is no football data available to analyse, and that is one of the most honest conclusions I can draw.

Signals to track

From now until the next qualifying round, there are four signals I will track and record.

First, the pace of further naturalisations. If PSSI announces more DPR-approved files, this stops being a supplementary policy and becomes the primary model.

Second, any move from FIFA on the territorial-connection criterion. If a review of the regulation emerges, Indonesia's advantage will be capped very quickly, and that would be a rule change far more consequential than any contract.

Third, the reaction of regional federations, Vietnam included. A squad list containing a diaspora player's name would be a clearer signal than any statement.

Fourth, and most important, actual cohesion on the pitch. If Indonesia play well, the identity story will quiet down. If they play poorly while expectations have been pushed high, the two stories — identity and performance — will merge into one, and the backlash will be many times larger than an ordinary defeat.

In 2026, the stands fell silent, but the tweets took turns applauding. I learned from that the supporter community does not disappear when stadiums close — it only moves. And in Indonesia right now, where the debate over Paes and Romeny happens mostly online, that is even truer.

I do not create the heartbeat of sport; I am only lucky enough to listen to it and retell it. What I heard this time is a federation buying time with history, and a region preparing to ask what that stretch of time costs. For Vietnamese football, the question is worth more than the answer: do we want to win quickly with paperwork, or slowly with the children on our own grass?