Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny and the Passport Route: Indonesia Pays in Time, Not Money

In February 2026 a photograph moved quickly across Indonesian newsrooms: Ole Romeny in a white shirt, standing straight, one hand resting on a folder of documents, taking the citizenship oath. What I looked at was not his face but his other hand — loosely closed, fingers curling in, the grip of a man who had never stood in that position and did not know where to put his nerves.

Six months earlier, at a different hour, I had watched another Dutchman on Southeast Asian grass: Maarten Paes, a goalkeeper born in 2026, cleared by FIFA to change association in August 2026 and handed his first cap for Indonesia in World Cup qualifying. One goalkeeper, one centre-forward. Two moments. One corridor.

That corridor deserves telling, because it is becoming a template for a whole region.

Two legal gates, and a third one

Kompas, the Indonesian daily, called Paes and Romeny "exceptional cases" and reached for the phrase "legal loophole". I read the phrase several times, and every reading left it slightly more crooked.

Both players had to pass through two separate systems. The first is Indonesian law: under Article 20 of Citizenship Law No. 12/2026, a foreign national may be naturalised in the national interest, subject to approval by the House of Representatives (DPR). The second is FIFA's Regulations Governing the Application of the Statutes: a player is eligible for a federation where a biological parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory. The grandparents of both Paes and Romeny were born in the Dutch East Indies, the territory Indonesia inherited.

Paes had a third gate to clear, the hardest one for a goalkeeper: a change of association. He had played for the Netherlands at Under-21 level, so standing in Indonesia's goal required separate FIFA approval — granted in August 2026. Romeny took the shorter detour: the oath in February 2026, then a debut in national colours.

One term rarely appears in regional coverage: blijvers, the Dutch who stayed in the Indies for the long haul rather than going home. Their descendants carry wholly European blood, yet a grandparent's birth certificate names a place inside today's Indonesian borders. In the language of law, birthplace outranks ethnic origin. On the terraces, that sounds odd. It is a designed rule, not a crack somebody forgot to seal.

The scale matters too. Since 2026 Indonesia has added a run of names raised in Europe: Sandy Walsh, Jordi Amat, Jay Idzes, Calvin Verdonk, Thom Haye, Mees Hilgers, Kevin Diks. Paes and Romeny sit at the end of that list, in the two most expensive positions. This is a strategy that has been running for several seasons, executed by an administration that knows how to work both a parliament and FIFA's rulebook.

Two positions, one spine

If you were allowed to patch a national team with outside resources in only two places, you would pick exactly the two PSSI picked. Goalkeeper and centre-forward. One man touches the ball with his hands more than anyone inside the box; the other touches it least, but touches it where scorelines are decided. A team's spine runs straight through those two points.

They are also the hardest positions to grow at home. A good full-back can emerge from almost any academy in the region. A goalkeeper calm enough for World Cup qualifying needs a decade of high-intensity football, and Southeast Asia does not produce many of those per generation. A centre-forward scoring steadily in Europe is the same story.

What stands out is not that Indonesia gained two good players, but that it found a recruitment channel with no transfer fee, no negotiation with a club, and no rival bidding against it. They did not buy on the market. They paid in something else: months of administrative time, persuasion in the legislature, the political credibility of the federation, and years of patience with paperwork. Kompas noted that PSSI pursued Paes's association switch persistently over a long period. That is a cost that appears on no balance sheet, and cannot be reclaimed.

Based on my experience covering matches, the goalkeeper is the one position where a single player can change a result without his team-mates improving. At FC Dallas, Paes showed a level of ball-playing that domestic Southeast Asian goalkeepers rarely reach. For that same reason, Indonesia's back line will have to learn to play differently: when your keeper can join the build-up, the line pushes higher, and the space behind the centre-backs widens. A good goalkeeper does not automatically create a good defence.

With Romeny the story tilts the other way. A European centre-forward in a Southeast Asian shirt usually carries two pressures at once: scoring, and surviving on meagre service. He will have games with seven touches. For a player raised in the Dutch system, where every phase has structure, that is the first professional shock.

At the strategic level this channel has a limit that short reports skip. Its supply is a closed historical population: the descendants of people born in the Dutch East Indies before 2026. That cohort does not renew itself. Every file used is a file permanently removed from the list. Indonesia is working a deposit of known size, and sooner or later it must turn back to youth development.

Set against Vietnam, the difference is structural. The Vietnamese diaspora is large, but the share of it raised inside European professional football is far thinner. Dang Van Lam, Nguyen Filip, and more recently the Jason Pendant case show the VFF walking the same road, at a more cautious pace and with fewer resources. Vietnam has no equivalent of the blijvers. What Vietnam has is a team built on cohesion and shared time, a slower but more durable advantage.

This brings to mind a familiar club-football model: buying clubs raise the ceiling, developing clubs hold the floor. Indonesia is behaving like a buying club at national-team level, and doing it competently. The transfer market is only a mirror — look into it and you see a club's fear. Here the mirror reflects a federation afraid that ten years of domestic development will not be enough to catch its neighbours.

The contrarian angle: the noise is in the wrong place

Indonesian coverage puts blood at the centre — players with no indigenous ancestry. That framing is emotionally coherent and legally crooked. Eligibility for a national team has never been about ethnicity. It is about where a biological grandparent was born. Paes and Romeny meet that test, and both cases were formally approved.

The second, more dangerous outside assumption is that a federation can import an entire team. It cannot. Eleven good players do not become a good team, and a dressing room with too many new faces arriving at once pays in the hardest currency to measure: hierarchy, who speaks in the meeting room, and the simple feeling of belonging.

This is where I watch most closely with Southeast Asian sides. The dressing room never lies — only the listener runs out of patience. In a squad with six or seven new faces inside two years, the question is not who is best, but who runs for whom in the 85th minute, a goal down. Answering that takes time, not another passport.

The other side of the risk deserves a look. These two carry attention matched to their positions. Lose a key qualifier and the story will fuse two themes instantly: a poor result, and naturalisation. A goalkeeper's slip will be read as a verdict on an entire policy. The sporting risk is bounded; the reputational risk is asymmetric — one failed eligibility file would do more damage than two successful ones do good.

What to track next

Three signals will show where this goes. First, the next naturalisation list and the names still in the pipeline. Second, the chatter in Europe about FIFA's grandparent criterion, because if enough federations take this road, a tightening cannot be ruled out.

Third, and most relevant to Vietnamese readers: how the VFF answers. Silence is an answer too. Big teams do not wait for luck — they prepare for the silence before the storm. Indonesia spent four years preparing a new spine. The regional question is no longer who has more naturalised players, but who keeps an identity while the ceiling is being pushed upward.