Paes, Romeny and Indonesia's Naturalisation Machine: When FIFA's Rules Had No Loophole

Three in the morning in Marseille. I sat in front of a screen with coffee that had gone cold hours earlier, rewatching Indonesia against Bahrain in the third round of Asian qualifying for the 2026 World Cup. In the 37th minute, a striker close to 1.90 metres took a pass on the edge of the box, turned, and finished across the keeper with his left foot. Technically, there was nothing to write about. What stuck was the commentary line behind it: "Ole Romeny, naturalised player, his first goal for Indonesia."

I opened a different file on my laptop. Two lines I had marked in red by hand: transfer fee, zero euros. Both cases.

A goalkeeper. A centre-forward. The two positions with the highest single-player leverage in football, where one individual can bend the outcome of the other ten. Not a single euro moved through the transfer market. Not one negotiation with a club. Not one agent commission. So what was paid, and with what currency?

A digital signature has never been a footprint, but it still leaves a trace.

Context: a wave stamped in red

Maarten Paes, born 2026, is a goalkeeper at FC Dallas in MLS. Ole Romeny, born 2026, is a forward at Oxford United. Those two names are only the visible part of a longer ledger: Thom Haye (2026), Calvin Verdonk (2026), Kevin Diks (2026), Mees Hilgers (2026), Eliano Reijnders (2026).

Nothing about this is administratively mysterious. The Indonesian football federation under chairman Erick Thohir chose a road already drawn in law, walked it step by step, and did so publicly. What the Indonesian press put on the table is not a scandal but a question of identity. Kompas and the major Jakarta outlets reach for phrases like "exceptional case", "legal loophole", "no indigenous blood". They call it a discovery. To me it reads more like an audit.

One thing has to be said up front: both players passed through two independent gates, and both gates were designed by people, not overlooked by them.

The first gate sits in citizenship law, not on the pitch

Article 20 of Indonesia's Citizenship Law No. 12/2026 permits naturalisation on grounds of state interest. The price of that mechanism is a signature from the House of Representatives. Romeny took his oath in February 2026, and the ceremony took place in front of the legislature. This is not a low-level administrative procedure. A player who wants to wear the Indonesia shirt by this route has to walk through a room full of elected politicians who weigh political value, not sprint speed.

The second gate sits in the FIFA Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes. The "substantial connection" criterion allows a player to represent a federation where a parent or biological grandparent was born. Paes's and Romeny's grandparents were born on the territory of the Dutch East Indies — the land whose borders, after 2026, became Indonesia. No clause in that text demands indigenous ethnicity. The only requirement is the birth geography of one generation.

Paes's case is the more delicate one, and this is where I stopped longest. He had played for the Netherlands at under-21 level. Under FIFA's system, a player who has represented another federation at youth level can still switch associations once, provided he has never played a competitive senior international. Paes's file went all the way to the Court of Arbitration for Sport before it was resolved, and the Indonesian federation pursued it for months.

They forgot that a contract is a document you can read backwards. The Dutch federation's records, the FIFA registration papers, the player's appearance dates — all of it sits in the system, and anyone with access can open it in reverse and check. Paes's file was never hidden. It was merely hard to read, and it required someone willing to sit long enough to read it to the end.

FIFA approved Paes's change of association in mid-2026. That was the final clearance, and it turns the real bottleneck of this entire machine into a technical detail few outlets bother to name correctly. Citizenship is only the necessary condition. The difficulty lies in the change-of-association procedure, and that is what separates a federation that can execute from one that merely issues statements.

Why a goalkeeper and a centre-forward

Look at the positions and part of the logic becomes obvious.

Goalkeeper and centre-forward are the two highest-leverage slots in a team. Expected-goals and expected-goals-conceded models both show that a player in either position can shift match outcomes more than a player anywhere else. For a national team — where the back line meets a few days before each match, where chemistry is capped by the number of training sessions — a reliable goalkeeper who commands his box stabilises the system immediately, with no integration period required.

Based on my experience tracking Asian qualifying matches, Southeast Asian sides rarely lose because they lack tactical ideas. They lose in a single moment: a cross not claimed, a back-pass misread in the 80th minute, a narrow-angle finish nobody can produce. A goalkeeper who fixes that moment and a forward who creates the opposite moment is a well-aimed investment, judged purely on the scoreboard.

Both also sit in the most valuable age band. Paes is entering a goalkeeper's peak, and a goalkeeper's peak extends far later than an outfield player's. Romeny is on the upward slope. That is exactly where a carefully calculated naturalisation campaign aims.

The economics everyone misreads

A zero transfer fee does not mean zero cost.

What was paid here is the time of a state apparatus, the political capital of a federation, and the credibility of the people who signed. The Indonesian federation spent years on two files, moved through two separate legal systems, and lobbied at both the legislative and the international-federation level. Multiply those years by the number of officials involved and the final figure stops looking like the "zero euros" in the headline.

In the trade I call this the eligibility premium. It appears in no club's financial statements, because it belongs to no club. It sits in a federation's budget and in the reputation of the people running that federation.

The graver problem is on the supply side.

The grandparent-born-on-territory condition turns a historical population into a resource deposit. That population has a name in the documents: the Europeans who stayed in the colony long term, and their descendants. Once tapped, the deposit does not replenish. No new generation of grandparents will be born in the Dutch East Indies, because that territory no longer exists under that name. This is a finite supply, and it drains with every file signed.

Structurally, the Indonesia national team is now operating like a buying club rather than an academy. That model raises the ceiling very fast. It leaves the floor exactly where it was, and the floor is what decides whether you survive a World Cup qualifying cycle.

A new profession is also forming around this model: intermediaries who trace genealogies, read colonial birth registers, and cross-check customs records against civil registries to find an eligible name. The service does not appear in any FIFA document, but it has clients.

The contrarian angle: "loophole" is the wrong word

I disagree with how the regional press, Jakarta included, has framed this.

The rule allowing players with a grandparent born on a federation's territory is not a late-discovered gap. It is a deliberately written criterion, because federations want to keep contact with their diaspora. Saying Paes and Romeny have no indigenous blood is biologically true and legally meaningless. Eligibility is not indigeneity. Eligibility is the birth geography of one earlier generation, and both men satisfy it with real documents.

Indonesia's genuine risks lie elsewhere, and neither is a legal risk.

The first is a substitution effect on the domestic academy. Every national-team shirt given to a naturalised player is a shirt a nineteen-year-old in Java does not get. Technically, nothing is wrong. But the cost shows up in five years, not five months, and it surfaces in the matches where the squad runs thin.

The second is the reputational load placed on two individuals. Paes and Romeny are not merely making saves and scoring goals; they are carrying the legitimacy of an entire policy. One costly error will be read as a verdict on naturalisation rather than on a goalkeeper. That is pressure no training ground prepares you for.

And if we are going to talk about morality, fairness requires the full picture. Vietnam is not outside this game. Nguyen Xuan Son is a naturalised case, and he scored at the ASEAN Championship. Malaysia is walking the same road. The Philippines has done it for years. The difference between federations is the scale of the genealogical pipeline, not the principle.

A dressing room has no camera, but it has whispers. For a national team that has absorbed five or six new Europe-based players in two years, the question is not how well they play. It is who speaks in that room, and in which language. Integration appears in no statistical table, which is precisely why it gets ignored until a team loses three in a row.

Finally, an ASEAN naturalisation arms race erodes the advantage of everyone taking part. If Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam all follow, Indonesia's bargain today becomes the regional baseline by 2030.

Takeaway

I will not call Paes and Romeny outsiders. They are Indonesian in the fullest legal sense, and their paperwork is cleaner than plenty of sponsorship contracts I read in my first working days in Ligue 1.

But there is a question the Indonesian federation should answer before it announces the next file: once the naturalisation deposit runs dry, will this team stand on legs it trained itself, or on a generation that was bought in while nobody built the replacements?