Paes, Romeny and Indonesia's Naturalization Play: A Designed Pathway, Not a Loophole

In Jakarta, people read out player names in their own particular way. The loudspeaker does not stress each syllable the European way; it reads the name as though it had been there a long time, as though it belonged to the stands before it belonged to any passport. I sat in the press tribune and heard the word “Paes” ring out and then get swallowed by seventy thousand voices. Nobody around me wondered where he was born.

But down below, in the press area, my Indonesian colleagues were asking a different question. They asked about bloodlines, about paperwork, about why the two brightest stars of the national team have not a single drop of indigenous blood. They used the phrase “exceptional case” as a way of keeping a distance from their own players. I sat and listened, and realised that the biggest argument in Southeast Asian football this season is not happening on grass. It is happening inside a dossier.

The dressing room does not lie — every whisper becomes an echo. But this time the whisper did not come from the dressing room. It came from the corridor of a parliament building.

Context: a campaign, not a craze

Indonesia's naturalization drive is not a flare that burns and dies. It is an organised campaign running over years, with a list that lengthens steadily: Jordi Amat, Sandy Walsh, Shayne Pattynama, Rafael Struick, Ivar Jenner, Justin Hubner, Elkan Baggott, Nathan Tjoe-A-On, Jay Idzes, then Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk, Kevin Diks. The last two names on that list — Maarten Paes and Ole Romeny — are also the two most contested, because they are regarded as its brightest stars.

The legal machinery behind them operates through two independent gates. The first is domestic law: Indonesian Citizenship Law No. 12/2026, Article 20, permits naturalization on grounds of state interest, subject to approval of each individual case by Indonesia's House of Representatives. The second is FIFA's own rulebook: the Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes, which include the “substantial connection” criterion allowing a player to represent a federation if a parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory.

Maarten Paes was born in 2026. He is a goalkeeper who previously represented the Netherlands at U21 level. Having played youth internationals for another federation made his file more complicated: he needed not only citizenship but also FIFA's approval of a change of association. He took his Indonesian citizenship oath in April 2026, and in August 2026 FIFA approved the federation transfer. Ole Romeny, a forward, completed his own ceremony in February 2026.

The interesting part lies in the historical root. This recruitment pool does not come from modern migration, but from a population formed more than three quarters of a century ago: the community of Dutch and European settlers who remained long-term in the Dutch East Indies, whom historians call the blijvers. Many of them were born on Indonesian soil and held colonial citizenship, while their bloodlines were entirely European. They left when the Indies dissolved, and their descendants grew up in the Netherlands with one legal anchor left behind in the old country: the birthplace of a grandparent.

In other words, Indonesia did not go looking for footballers. Indonesia went looking for their grandparents' birth certificates.

Analysis: the leverage is in the position, not the name

Looking only at the list, one might conclude that Indonesia is buying names. But look at the positions of the two most contested names and the story changes. Goalkeeper and centre-forward are the two roles with the greatest single-player leverage on a result. A full-back or a central midfielder can play well and still lose. A goalkeeper in form, or a striker who converts one chance, can decide a match in their own moment.

Strengthening the spine always delivers more value per unit of cost than strengthening the periphery. And Indonesia chose the right spine. Paes is the number one goalkeeper; Romeny is the centre-forward option. In national-team football, where a back line almost never gets enough time together to build shared reflexes, a goalkeeper capable of organising and covering the box produces a stabilising effect far beyond his individual worth. This is inference, not published data, but it is consistent with how Southeast Asian national teams have operated for twenty years.

There is something I want to say plainly, because I have sat in enough regional stands to believe it. A Southeast Asian national team does not lose for lack of tactical ideas. It loses for lack of people to execute those ideas in the three decisive moments of a match. Naturalisng two leverage positions is the most direct available solution to that problem, and it is far cheaper than waiting for an academy generation to ripen.

The real price is not a transfer fee

Seen from the transfer market, this is a channel for acquiring players at zero fee. No money moves from one federation to a club. But concluding from that fact that it is free means missing exactly the most expensive part of the story.

The real price is administrative cost, legal cost and political capital. Paes's change-of-association file was pursued by the Indonesian federation persistently over an extended period, and it had to pass a vote in the House of Representatives. A club spends a few million euros on a South American striker; a federation spends two years of negotiation, a family history file and a legislative session to get one goalkeeper. Those two kinds of expenditure cannot be weighed on the same scale.

I call that difference the eligibility premium: a cost incurred not to pay a seller, but to pay the system that permits the transaction. For smaller football nations, that premium is usually the real barrier, not the player's value. That Indonesia cleared it says more about its organisational capacity than about its wealth.

This recruitment pool is finite, and nobody wants to say so

The blijver community is a closed historical population. It does not reproduce itself as a pool. Those who have a grandparent born on Indonesian territory are ageing today, and their next generation — the one whose grandparents were born in the Netherlands — will no longer satisfy the grandparent-birthplace test.

That turns the naturalization strategy into a non-renewable resource. It resembles a club that decides not to invest in its academy and instead spends the money on established players. Within three years, the squad is visibly stronger. Within ten, the club depends on a market whose prices are set by others. By year fifteen, it discovers it has no children left to sell.

The substitution effect does not show up on the scoreboard; it shows up in the eyes of a twelve-year-old. When most of the starting XI grew up in Europe, the minutes available to players developed in the domestic league get compressed. That is not technically wrong. But it changes what a football culture transmits to the next generation: the incentive to pursue the profession. Nobody files a financial statement for that loss.

Here I want to raise something slightly larger, which I have observed over many years following domestic teams. Shirt sponsorship increasingly comes from global brands, and what they buy is broadcast exposure. They are not buying a relationship with a neighbourhood. When a national team grows stronger through naturalization, its media value rises and sponsorship deals improve — but the thread between that team and a child in a port city thins. That relationship appears on no balance sheet, so it is never accounted for. It simply disappears.

Five substitutions and the last twenty minutes

There is a technical detail I consider central, yet it is rarely mentioned when people discuss naturalization. It is the five-substitution rule.

Squad depth helps you hold your rhythm in the first half, but it actually wins matches in the final twenty minutes — when the game becomes a war of attrition. In Southeast Asia, where temperatures routinely exceed 33 degrees, humidity is high and tournaments schedule matches every three days, the final twenty minutes are no longer purely tactical. They are about who still has legs, who still has bodies, and who still has options.

For years this was the paradox of Southeast Asian national teams. Thin squads, but a rule permitting five changes. The result was that everyone could substitute, and nobody had anything to substitute. Indonesia now does. They can send on a midfielder who has played in a European top division at minute 70 instead of a youngster who has never played an international. That is an advantage multiplied by the rule, not by anyone's individual talent.

But the same rule shapes how opponents must play. If you do not have comparable depth, you must win before the war of attrition begins. You must score inside the first sixty minutes, or you must accept that from minute 75 you will be pinned back. This is something a team like Vietnam needs to factor in, not during the match, but in how it allocates energy and plans its training camps.

Vietnam is not outside this card game

Before concluding that Indonesia has moved a long step ahead of us, I want to place the matter in its proper frame.

Vietnam is not a football nation standing outside the naturalization game. Nguyen Xuan Son, a Brazil-born forward naturalized in 2026, scored in his very first ASEAN Cup and became the spearhead of the team. Filip Nguyen, a goalkeeper born in Czechia to a Vietnamese family, has also acquired citizenship and been called up to the national team. In principle, we are playing the same hand, only on a different scale.

The difference lies in historical trajectories. Vietnam sat within the French colonial bloc, and French-descended communities left behind no significant pool of elite footballers. The Vietnamese diaspora in Europe is large but largely did not pass through professional football academies. To put it bluntly: Indonesia inherited a mine; Vietnam inherited a well, and the well is not deep.

That does not mean we are absolutely weaker. It means our advantage must come from elsewhere: cohesion, the ability to organise a defensive block, and the stability of a cohort trained together since childhood. That is a slower, harder advantage, but a more durable one. And it only has value if we genuinely invest in it rather than chasing our neighbour's results column.

There were years when I did not merely write about a team, but learned to listen to its breathing. And the breathing of a football nation is not measured by the number of naturalized players in the starting XI. It is measured by how many home-grown players still have a place ten years from now.

The counter-intuitive angle: calling it a loophole is a mistake

Indonesian media call these “exceptional cases” and “legal loopholes”. I think the phrasing is technically wrong, and the error matters because it shapes how the public treats its own players.

The grandparent-birthplace criterion is a rule FIFA designed deliberately, not a system bug. It exists to handle cases of migration, war and partitioned territory — cases so common that without the rule, international football could not function. A pathway that does not close off a flow of people, but is a door fitted in the right place, is not a loophole. It is a door.

The decisive legal point turns on one word: eligible does not mean indigenous. Those two concepts are conflated in most of the commentary I have read. FIFA governs playing status, not ancestry. A valid passport is sufficient, and in practice it has been sufficient since the rule was written.

But here is where I want to push back on both sides. Those who say Indonesia is performing magic, and those who say the region should panic, are both exaggerating. The recruitment pool is finite, the integration cost is real, and what Indonesia has bought is a short-term ceiling, not a long-term floor. A national team can import a spine, but it cannot import an identity — that has to be built in the dressing room, with time, with shared failure and with late-morning sessions nobody sees.

Their biggest risk is not in defence or attack. It is that this strategy substitutes for academy development rather than complementing it. And the reputational risk is asymmetric: two valid files deliver moderate benefit, while one failed file in the future — a documentation gap, an eligibility dispute — will cause far greater damage. If Paes or Romeny is absent through injury in a decisive match, the “strength uplift” story will immediately show its thinness.

And there is one more thing I believe is coming. The Philippines and Malaysia have both been playing this same hand in different ways. When many nations exploit one type of resource, each nation's advantage is diluted — not because rivals grow stronger, but because of scarcity itself. That race has no durable winner.

Signals to watch

I will not close with a prediction, because I have been in this profession long enough to know that forecasts about Southeast Asian football usually fail precisely when we are most confident. I will close with what I intend to watch.

The first is the next rounds of approval in Indonesia's House of Representatives. Every additional name cleared will show how much runway the strategy still has, and whether it shifts from reinforcing the spine to filling peripheral roles — a sign of exhaustion.

The second is the noise at FIFA around the grandparent-birthplace criterion. If that rule is ever opened for review, every calculation in the region must be redone from scratch.

The third is the response of the Vietnam Football Federation. The appearance of one or two more Europe-raised players of Vietnamese descent in a squad list will tell me which road we are choosing.

And the fourth, the one I care about most: the integration that actually happens on the pitch. Not on a squad list, but in the way a goalkeeper calls his defenders' names at a corner, in the way a striker celebrates a goal with the man who just passed to him. I keep the beat for the team, but they are the ones who taught me that the rhythm never stops — and that rhythm can only be heard by someone who has stayed in the dressing room long enough to tell the difference between a real call and an empty round of applause.

I once mispronounced a man's name, and realised I had quietly erased his identity. I retell that story not to apologise again, but to say this: when we call a player by a name, we are confirming that he exists as a person, not as a contract. Indonesia is learning to call Paes and Romeny by two names at once — one in the stands, one in the dossier. Only when those two names converge will they truly have a number one goalkeeper and a number one striker. Until then, they merely have two correctly spelled names.