Passport, Bloodline and the Clock: How Indonesia Added Maarten Paes and Ole Romeny to the National Team

August 2026: A file leaves Zurich

In August 2026, a file left FIFA headquarters in Zurich with an approval signature for a change of association covering a goalkeeper born in 2026. Six months later, in February 2026, a forward holding a Dutch passport placed his hand on an oath document before Indonesian lawmakers. The two events happened half a world apart, passed through two different legal systems, and landed in the same place: the Indonesia national team squad list.

Sitting in Rome, rereading old case files, I realised I had seen this pattern too many times to be surprised. Not in Indonesia, but in Italy itself, where every major deal begins with a single question: how many days are left?

Before you talk about transfers, talk about time – a wrong clock kills the whole deal. I wrote that line in my notebook back in 2026, after Ivan Perišić nearly lost his move to Inter Milan because a release clause expired on 15 July. We extended it to 31 July, and the deal closed at 45 million euros plus 5 million in variables.

The Indonesia story is not about the money. It sits in something harder to price: a bloodline split apart a century ago, and a rulebook written long ago that is now being read again.

Context: a region rewriting its own rules

Southeast Asia was never a transfer market in the European sense. Nobody here buys a striker for 60 million euros. They buy with a passport, with a grandparent's birth certificate, with a flight back to a homeland the family left three generations ago.

My notebook draws three tiers. The top tier holds Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand – the group competing for continental finals and harbouring wider ambitions. The middle tier holds the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. The lower tier holds Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.

What is changing is how the top tier upgrades itself. Thailand relies on academies and a stable domestic league. Vietnam relies on cohorts grown from domestic training centres, plus a small diaspora contribution. Indonesia has taken a third road, and it is the road the original Kompas report describes: recruiting European-based players of Indonesian descent, formalising them through citizenship law, and slotting them straight into the national team.

The historical foundation is the Dutch East Indies. For centuries, Dutch and other European settlers lived across the archipelago, raised families, built homes. A share of them stayed permanently – scholars call them blijvers, the ones who remained. Their descendants carry fully European ancestry, yet their grandparents' birth certificates record a city inside what is now Indonesia.

That is the key. Not Indonesian blood. The birthplace of a grandparent.

Vietnam has no equivalent reserve. French colonial history left a large diaspora across Europe and North America, but the share of that community pursuing professional football at the highest level is far smaller. This is a structural disadvantage, not a failure of effort.

The two legal gates Maarten Paes and Ole Romeny had to pass

Reading the file, I separate it into two independent gates. One is Indonesian citizenship. The other is FIFA eligibility. Both had to open. Both did.

The first gate is Indonesia's Citizenship Law No. 12 of 2026, specifically Article 20, which permits naturalisation in the national interest by decision of the House of Representatives, the DPR. It is a discretionary mechanism: the state chooses the person, not the other way round. Parliament must vote. For Paes that came in April 2026. For Romeny it led to the oath ceremony in February 2026.

The second gate is FIFA's eligibility framework, sitting inside the regulations governing the application of the FIFA Statutes, including the substantial-connection criterion. One route is a biological parent or grandparent born on the territory of the federation. Paes and Romeny satisfy the grandparent route.

The subtlest point, and the one the press mentions least, sits with Paes. He represented the Netherlands at under-21 level. Once a player has represented one federation at youth level, switching requires a change-of-association procedure – what my notebook calls the narrowest door in international football. FIFA cleared Paes in August 2026.

That is why I tell younger colleagues: read the dates before you read the names. A change-of-association file can take months, and across those months a player's sporting value does not move, while his legal value shifts week by week.

On this axis, PSSI – the Indonesian federation – pursued the Paes file persistently over a long period. In my trade, persistence is not a moral quality. It is an investment. Every call, every document, every trip carries a cost that never appears on any balance sheet.

The core: why a goalkeeper and a centre-forward

This is where I want to slow down, because it explains why the strategy works better than it looks.

In football, not every position carries the same leverage. A good full-back lifts a team slightly. A good central midfielder lifts it more. But goalkeeper and centre-forward are the two slots where one individual can change a result with his own hands and feet, independent of the system.

A settled first-choice goalkeeper does something no tactical diagram can do: he reduces variance. At national-team level, where centre-backs train together for a handful of days every few months, low familiarity is the default. A sure-handed keeper turns small defensive errors into situations that never happen.

A centre-forward works the other way. He increases variance in a favourable direction. The team can play badly and the score still changes.

Indonesia filling exactly those two positions in the same window is not coincidence. It is one logic: use external resources to reinforce the spine rather than the periphery.

For Vietnam, the equation runs the other way. For years, Vietnam's midfield and defence have been well organised thanks to continuity across domestic cohorts. What has often been missing is a centre-forward who scores at continental level. Had Vietnam's diaspora pool ever produced a striker playing in a top European league, I believe the story would have looked different long ago.

Financially, one thing must be stated plainly: this is not a transfer in the fee-paying sense. No money was paid to the clubs holding Paes or Romeny. The real cost sits elsewhere – administrative, legal, political, and reputational if a file fails.

In other words, Indonesia found a talent channel with no transfer fee. For a federation outside Asia's wealthiest group, that is a genuine competitive advantage.

One line the original report omits: this reserve is finite and non-renewable. The blijvers are a closed historical population. Their descendants have a fixed number. Once the generation of grandparents with valid documentation is exhausted, no new layer appears.

A strategy built on colonial legacy is a strategy with an expiry date, and that date does not renew. PSSI may be in its best harvest window. The clock still runs.

The contrarian angle: loophole, or a door that was designed

Here I want to be blunt, because I once lost six hours in 2026 only to learn that the press can turn a lawful clause into a scandal without anyone lying.

Indonesian coverage of this case revolves around two phrases: exceptional case, and legal loophole. It sounds reasonable. Reading the law closely tells a different story.

The grandparent birthplace criterion is not a FIFA defect. It is a designed rule, written, adopted and applied thousands of times worldwide. The people who wrote it knew it allows a player without indigenous ancestry to be eligible for international football.

Eligibility is not indigeneity. That is the whole story, in one sentence.

So why does it still feel uncomfortable? Because football does not run on rules alone. It runs on collective emotion. A national team is a symbol, and symbols do not follow clauses.

This is the blind spot of every naturalisation policy, and I have seen it in many places. The biggest risk is not in a courtroom. It is in the stands.

There is an asymmetry worth recording, because it will reappear in the coming years: one failed naturalisation file does far more damage than the benefit delivered by two successful ones. Two successes deliver two players. One failure delivers a crack in public trust, and that crack is not patched by a win.

The second risk is structural. When a national team leans on naturalised players in spine positions, it becomes single-point dependent. If the goalkeeper dips, or the striker is injured at the wrong moment in qualifiers, the strength-uplift narrative gets dissected – and this time by results rather than by law.

The third risk is regional. The Philippines and Malaysia have walked, or are walking, the same road. When several federations tap the same resource, the advantage depreciates. The Southeast Asian naturalisation race produces no absolute winner, only whoever arrives first.

And there is a scenario few want to consider: if the wave widens, FIFA could face pressure to revisit the birthplace criterion. A global rule change would neutralise everyone's advantage at once.

The clock and the qualification cycle

Back to the thing I trust most in this trade.

Maarten Paes was born in 2026. At 27, he is entering a goalkeeper's peak, and for this position a peak can stretch seven to ten more years. Ole Romeny, in the file I hold, sits in the ascending-or-peak band – I leave the birth year unverified because the source does not state it.

More important than birth years is when they became eligible Indonesians.

In August 2026, FIFA's door opened for Paes. In February 2026, the citizenship door closed fully for Romeny. Between those markers runs a sequence of Indonesia matches in regional tournaments and qualifiers. Every match that passes is a match one of them could not play.

In transfer economics, that is pure opportunity cost. Nobody books it. It is real anyway.

Based on my experience watching matches across Serie A and Asian competitions from a screen in Rome, I always check one thing before the line-up: the gap between the day a player becomes eligible and the day the competition starts. A short gap means he plays. A long gap means he plays and is forgiven more.

In Indonesia's case, the gap was compressed to the minimum. That is why these two names appeared immediately rather than through a long trial period.

The meeting room: real people behind a passport

I want to tell an old story, because it directly shapes how I read naturalisation news.

In 2026, with stadiums empty during the pandemic, a Brescia club employee called me. Three months of unpaid wages. Bankruptcy risk was as clear as a verdict. I convened a nine-hour online meeting with the board, the captain and representatives of the Italian players' association.

I saw a player cry in that meeting over three months of wages – football holds things a betting screen will never display.

The outcome was a wage agreement spread across four instalments. The club escaped insolvency. Twenty-seven players' families slept better.

The old 2026 sheet is still in my drawer – I never erase the history of my mistakes. I repeat it because it is the root of everything I have written since. After the 2026 false story about Gonzalo Higuaín, I built an evidence chain for every piece: contracts, messages, timelines, at least two independent sources. No exceptions.

The 2026 case deserves restating. A fake account claimed Higuaín wanted out of Juventus on seven million euros a season. It drew 2.1 million views in five hours. I called the agent, who denied it but would not speak publicly. I spent six hours cross-checking the contract and release clause with Lega Serie A. My correction got thirty thousand reads. The false story kept running.

The lesson: speed is not a value. Accuracy is.

That is why I look at the Paes and Romeny files differently from most of the commentary online. Not to defend them, but to ask the right question.

The right question is not whether they carry Indonesian blood. The right question is whether they qualify under Indonesian law and under FIFA regulations. Both have been answered.

The third question, the one nobody wants to ask, is: if they fail on the pitch, who carries the blame?

In my experience, the answer is always the player. Never the person who signed the file.

Media, expectation and the loophole spiral

Source quality deserves attention, because it is the most overlooked part.

The underlying report comes from Kompas, a reputable Indonesian outlet I class as citable. The aggregation I read afterwards does not state its own source. In this trade, that is a signal to slow down a beat.

This story sits between emergence and acceleration. The press has just discovered the detail; there is no mass reaction yet. That is the most dangerous moment, because a hypothesis can be written as fact simply by repetition.

I split expectations into two layers.

The first is about team results. The narrative says naturalisation makes the team stronger. Strength here is asserted, not measured. No FIFA ranking points, no qualifier results, no comparative data are cited to quantify the uplift.

The second is about the two individuals. Here my assessment is more favourable. Their positions carry high leverage. But expectations about output – goals, saves – remain expectations, not data.

What catches my eye is not the content but the vocabulary. The word loophole is an opinion, not a legal event. When a newspaper uses it, it invites readers to judge a door the governing body deliberately opened.

Over the long run, I expect this story to live short-to-medium term. It is tied to Indonesia's next fixtures. Good results will turn the two names into praise pieces. Bad results will turn them into symbols of a doubted policy.

This is the hype-then-kill structure I have seen far too often in Serie A. It does not start with malice. It starts with curiosity.

What it means for Vietnamese football

I write this section for Vietnamese readers, as an observer rather than an insider of Vietnamese football.

Three things need tracking.

First, the squad lists of direct rivals. If Indonesia keeps adding European-born players, pressure in qualifiers rises in every head-to-head. The simplest way to watch is to read PSSI announcements and DPR approval decisions.

Second, Vietnamese football's own response. Two roads exist. One is to accelerate down the naturalisation model, hunting overseas Vietnamese players and fast-tracking their paperwork. The other is to hold the self-development model, built on cohesion and academy systems. The second is slower but more durable, and it carries no expiry date.

Third, the global governance debate. If the grandparent criterion is ever reviewed, every calculation changes at once.

My emphasis: this should not be read as a crisis. Read it as a market signal. A rival found a new supply channel, and that channel has a shelf life. Knowing the shelf life matters more than knowing it exists.

In my notebook, the Southeast Asia page has never carried this many bullet points.

What remains at the end

I have spent years writing about deals priced in millions of euros. What I remember is not the numbers. What I remember are the evenings waiting for a legal document to be signed, knowing that a single day's delay would change everything.

With Paes and Romeny, everything has been signed. They are eligible Indonesians, and they will wear the national shirt. That is no longer a question.

What remains is a different question, and it is not addressed to them.

When a federation builds a national team from bloodlines split three generations ago, is it repairing history or postponing the future?

I leave that one open. At 69, I have learned something: the right questions tend to outlive the quick answers.

And the clock keeps running.