Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny and a Pre-Built Track: Indonesia Is Not Cutting Corners

One afternoon in Senayan, and a foot rhythm that made me stop

During an open training session of the Indonesia national team at the Senayan sports complex in Jakarta, I left the press seats, walked down to the touchline and stood there for nearly forty minutes. I was not there to take photographs. I was there to watch a goalkeeper's feet.

Maarten Paes received the ball from a centre-back, placed it on the grass, took three steps back, opened his hips, and passed. Four times in a row, the rhythm was identical: touch, step back, open, pass. On the fifth, he switched direction abruptly and drove the ball into the gap between the right centre-back and the wide midfielder, where an Indonesian player was already accelerating. No applause, no instruction, no one turning to praise. The team simply moved on as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

I have spent enough time beside pitches to know that moments like this almost never reach a television broadcast. A foot rhythm on grass does not lie; you just have to stand on the touchline long enough. A goalkeeper with a settled distribution rhythm at this level is something Southeast Asian football usually has to buy with money, time, or both.

Three weeks later, a colleague in Jakarta sent me an article. Kompas was raising questions about the cases of Paes and Ole Romeny: the two players presented as Indonesia's brightest stars, neither with indigenous ancestry, both having passed through a legal process the paper called an 'exceptional case'. The word 'loophole' appeared in the text. That word is what kept me sitting there for a long time, because it did not match the foot rhythm I had watched in Senayan.

A player without indigenous ancestry can still be fully eligible. Those are two entirely different things. And if we blend them together, we will misread the far larger story unfolding across Southeast Asia — the story Vietnam is now obliged to answer.

Context: two years of regional reordering

Two dates explain why these naturalisation files deserve serious analysis.

On 21 March 2026, Indonesia beat Vietnam 1-0 in Jakarta in the second round of Asian qualification for the 2026 World Cup. Five days later, on 26 March 2026, Indonesia beat Vietnam 3-0 in Hanoi. Two matches, six points, no goals conceded, against an opponent that had stood above them regionally for nearly two decades. Iraq and the Philippines were in the same group; Indonesia advanced, Vietnam did not.

On the evening of 19 November 2026, Indonesia beat Saudi Arabia 2-0 at Gelora Bung Karno. A Southeast Asian side beating a West Asian World Cup participant at home in the third round of qualifying had not happened for years. Weeks later, Vietnam won the 2026 ASEAN Championship, beating Thailand across a two-legged final. Regional football therefore carries two parallel stories: Indonesia going further on the continental stage, Vietnam holding the regional crown.

Look at the squad composition, though, and the two stories run on entirely different tracks.

Over two years, Indonesia introduced into its national-team system a cohort of Dutch-diaspora players — men born and raised in Europe, trained in European academies, whose ancestors were born on the territory of the former Dutch East Indies. The list includes names such as Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk and Kevin Diks, and most recently Maarten Paes and Ole Romeny. Vietnam, in parallel, took a different route: keeping a domestic core and adding a small number of selective naturalisations, most notably striker Nguyen Xuan Son, who debuted in late 2026 and contributed heavily to the regional title.

The difference is not whether a country naturalises. The difference is scale, supply and speed. Indonesia is drawing on a historical supply pool that is almost impossible to reproduce. Vietnam is drawing on a far narrower pool, and mainly buying players already established in domestic or regional leagues.

That is why the Kompas piece deserves reading not as entertainment about two players, but as a document about how a direct competitor operates.

Two gates, and one thing the paper does not say clearly enough

Any analysis of a naturalisation case must separate two entirely independent gates. Many articles, and most social-media debate, collapse them into one and therefore misstate the substance.

The first gate is the citizenship law of the receiving country. In Indonesia, that is Citizenship Law No. 12 of 2026. The mechanism used for diaspora players is discretionary naturalisation in the national interest under Article 20 — discretionary meaning that meeting technical conditions does not automatically grant citizenship; approval by Indonesia's House of Representatives (DPR) is required. Paes completed this part in 2026. Romeny took his citizenship oath in February 2026.

The second gate is FIFA's eligibility framework, specifically the change-of-association mechanism for players who have previously represented another federation at youth level. To be approved, a player must satisfy a connection criterion to the new federation's territory — most commonly a parent or grandparent born there. Both Paes and Romeny cleared this gate. Paes is the more delicate case on paper, because he represented the Netherlands at U21 level and therefore needed a formal federation transfer rather than simply presenting a new passport. FIFA approved that request in August 2026.

The key point the paper understates: neither gate requires indigenous ancestry. That is not a flaw. It is the design.

I learned this lesson painfully. In 2026, during Switzerland's match against Serbia in Kaliningrad, I mispronounced Granit Xhaka's name three times in the first half alone. Swiss fans in the stands turned and jeered. Three mispronunciations of Xhaka taught me to read a person before writing about him. After that tournament I stayed in Russia an extra month, rented a room, reviewed footage, and built a personal pronunciation database for every player I had ever misnamed.

Applied to the Paes and Romeny files, the conclusion is unambiguous: under both Indonesian citizenship law and FIFA eligibility rules, both players are fully eligible. There is no legal basis to call this a violation, and none to call it fraud. That is precisely what a headline using the word 'loophole' skips over.

But the interesting part is not legality

An eligible player is not automatically a correctly placed player.

Look at the positions. Maarten Paes is a goalkeeper, born in 2026. Ole Romeny is a forward. In football, these are the two positions with the greatest single-player leverage on results. A good centre-back or wide midfielder can upgrade a team. A good goalkeeper and a good centre-forward can change the number of points a team collects, almost literally.

In a national-team setting — where players assemble for a few days per window and where defensive familiarity rarely reaches club levels — the value of a reliable goalkeeper is higher still. New defensive systems usually break precisely where individuals have not yet learned each other. The last line benefits from that, and pays for it.

At the other end, a strong centre-forward solves a different problem: converting matches where a team dominates possession but cannot score into three points. In World Cup qualifying, the decisive fixtures tend to be exactly this type — evenly matched, finely balanced, settled by a single moment.

One clarification matters. Indonesia reinforcing exactly the two highest-leverage spine positions is a deliberate strategic signal, not a coincidence. But reinforcing the right positions does not equal being stronger. Those are two different claims.

Kompas asserts that the naturalised players have raised the team's level. The assertion sounds plausible. It is not measured. No comparative data, no FIFA ranking-point delta, no qualifying result is cited as evidence. It is a narrative claim, not a data claim.

Based on my experience watching matches across Southeast Asia for years, regional media have a hard habit of attributing every step forward to a new star and every step back to a coach. That framing is easy to write and easy to read, and it is almost always wrong at the level of detail.

It is also worth noting that Indonesia's naturalisation wave did not begin with Paes or Romeny. It built up over years, and these two are simply the most prominent names in the latest layer. The effect of a recruitment wave is rarely found in the flashiest names; it is found in a deeper bench, sharper internal competition, and a domestic youngster forced to improve faster to keep a place.

The real cost of a deal with no transfer fee

In press coverage, these moves are usually presented as free acquisitions. In the narrow sense of the club transfer market, that is true. No club pays, no release clause is triggered, no agent commission surfaces.

Calling them free, however, misstates the economics.

A national-interest naturalisation consumes three cost categories that never appear on a transfer balance sheet. First, administrative and legal cost: building the file, proving ancestral connection to the territory, working with state agencies, and — in Indonesia's case — assembling a case convincing enough for parliamentary approval. Second, federation diplomacy: persuading FIFA to approve a change of association for players who have represented a European federation at youth level. Third, and least discussed, reputational cost: each case forces the federation to explain publicly why it is selecting someone born abroad.

According to the source reporting, the Indonesian football association pursued Paes's federation transfer persistently over an extended period. The word 'persistently' matters. It signals that this was not an automatic administrative process but a campaign with owners, a time budget, and political risk attached to failure.

One layer the source does not raise: the supply pool Indonesia is tapping is historical and finite. Eligibility rests on grandparents born on the territory of the former Dutch East Indies. The Indo-Dutch population that existed in the archipelago during the colonial period has been a closed population since the mid-twentieth century. Their descendants now live scattered across the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. It is a defined group, and every qualified player brought in reduces what remains.

This is what short analyses of Indonesia usually miss: their model is effective but not infinitely reproducible. Within three to five years, as the Dutch-diaspora cohort of sufficient quality thins, Indonesia will face the question every football nation must eventually answer: domestic development. There is no permanent bypass.

I think of 2026, when the Chinese second division was suspended and Sichuan Jiuniu went three months without paying wages. No foreign player, no transfer contract, rescued that situation. Only 1,257 supporters donating within two weeks did. An empty stadium, a full heart — that was the year I understood why I sit where I sit. Football does not run on transfer-market numbers. It runs on whether anyone is still standing at the gate when things are difficult.

Media pressure: when 'loophole' becomes a weapon

One detail in the source reporting matters more than its legal content: the framing.

The paper does not celebrate. It investigates. It calls the case 'exceptional' and uses 'loophole' to describe the route both players took. That framing poses a silent question: do these two really belong to the Indonesia national team?

Legally, that question has been answered at both levels. Socially, it has never been answered, and may never be settled.

In Indonesia, the naturalisation debate carries a specific charge that Vietnam and most neighbours do not share to the same degree, because it is tied to colonial memory. The Indo-Dutch population once occupied a distinctive social position during the colonial period. When a player with a Dutch surname enters the national team, the story is no longer only about football. It is about history, identity, and who is permitted to represent the nation.

This is the most dangerous class of public pressure in sport, because it cannot be defeated with data. You cannot prove with a statistic that a person belongs to a country.

For the Indonesian federation, this means every new diaspora call-up requires a prepared public explanation — a recurring governance cost. For Paes and Romeny the pressure takes a different form: as the wave's two most prominent stars, every mistake on the pitch will be attributed to naturalisation policy itself. A wasted chance in the 88th minute has less to do with technique than with the price of being treated as an outsider.

From a performance-psychology standpoint, this is a real risk. Young national-team players already operate in a state where every touch carries career weight. For a player whose right to represent is questioned, that state doubles.

The dressing room: the part no article measures

In any national-team analysis, one region sits beyond the reach of data: dressing-room relations.

A squad of eleven players developed in five countries, speaking four languages, holding four different understandings of hierarchy, is a governance problem before it is a tactical one. At continental level, Southeast Asian teams have historically enjoyed a quiet advantage in cohesion, because their players grew up together inside a national system. Importing players buys quality and sells that cohesion.

Nothing in the source reporting addresses Indonesia's dressing room. No coach is named, no information on integration management appears, no domestic player is quoted about losing a place. That absence is not a flaw in the article — it is a legal report. But it means every conclusion about integration must be parked.

On individual profiles, a few details matter. Paes, born in 2026, is in his goalkeeping prime, and goalkeeper primes tend to extend later than other positions. He can serve Indonesia for years absent injury. Romeny is a forward, and his birth year is not given in the source analysis, so I leave that open and will verify before drawing any career-arc conclusion.

One thing is certain: if Indonesia relies on Paes and Romeny alone, they build a team with a high ceiling and a thin foundation. If they build a domestic layer genuinely capable of competing for places against the diaspora cohort, they build a team both strong and durable. The difference between those scenarios lies not in naturalisation files but in the next decade of youth development.

At this point, Indonesia's federation deserves credit: it ran two complex legal systems in parallel, from parliamentary approval to FIFA clearance, across two different cases. That is organisational capability, not luck. What organisational capability does not automatically deliver is long-term strategy.

Southeast Asia and a race that has just started

A fact often overlooked: Indonesia is not the only country in the region doing this. The Philippines has walked the diaspora path for years, largely via its American community. Malaysia has taken smaller comparable steps. What Indonesia does differently is scale, speed, and the level of the leagues its diaspora players occupy.

A naturalisation wave in one country can be a stopgap. Naturalisation waves in four countries simultaneously constitute a structural shift. When several federations exploit the same mechanism, the advantage it confers declines for everyone.

For Vietnam, this is a signal to read correctly. Vietnam holds advantages in a youth system that has been invested in relatively seriously for over a decade, a domestic league with real audiences, and a domestic generation that has played together across multiple national-team levels. Vietnam lacks a high-quality football diaspora — the number of overseas-born players of Vietnamese descent competing in European leagues at national-team level is very small compared to Indonesia's.

That means the two countries are competing on two different pitches at once. Indonesia is optimising for short-term results by importing already-developed quality. Vietnam, if it holds its route, is optimising for cohesion and durability.

One recent head-to-head detail stays with me. In March 2026, Indonesia beat Vietnam twice in five days. In December of the same year, Vietnam won the regional championship while Indonesia did not field their strongest squad. Those two outcomes say something important about the two competitions: one measures the ability to withstand pressure at continental level, the other at regional level. They are different yardsticks, and both count.

Contrarian view: 'loophole' is a misreading, and the misreading has a price

The prevailing reading is that Indonesia found a crack in the rules and is exploiting it to obtain players it should not have. That reading is emotionally appealing, spreads easily, and is technically wrong.

The birthplace-of-parent-or-grandparent criterion is a deliberate feature of FIFA's eligibility framework. It exists to address a real problem: in a world where people cross borders more often than ever, a player may genuinely belong to more than one country. It is not a bug in the system. It is part of the system.

A second common reading holds that naturalisation is a shortcut to success and that everyone should copy it if it works. That reading ignores cost — administrative, political, reputational, and the opportunity cost to youth development. It also ignores a dry fact: you cannot naturalise anyone if there is no one to naturalise. A country without a sufficiently large, football-connected diaspora cannot replicate this model no matter how much it wants to.

A third reading, the most dangerous, infers policy quality from results. Indonesia wins, therefore naturalisation is right. Indonesia loses, therefore it is wrong. That turns a long-term policy into a scoreboard indicator and would have federations rewriting national strategy after every match.

The graver concern lies elsewhere. If a future naturalisation file is found to contain a documentation gap, the damage would be disproportionate to the benefits all successful cases combined have delivered. In football, an eligibility scandal can erase years of building. That is an asymmetric risk, and it demands far stricter diligence than an ordinary transfer requires.

A systemic risk also deserves mention: as naturalisation spreads, FIFA may face pressure to revisit the criterion. Any federation building strategy on the current rule should price in that possibility. Football has seen rule changes reverse an entire group of nations' advantages within a single cycle.

A replicable template, and a window still open

Viewed as a whole, the file reveals a four-step template: identify players with ancestors born on your territory, persuade them to choose your national team through a lawful citizenship route, clear FIFA's eligibility gate, then integrate them into the squad.

This template is copyable. It is not Indonesia's monopoly. The Philippines went earlier in a different version. Malaysia could push harder. Vietnam may have to reconsider the balance between the two routes. Other Asian federations are moving in the same direction.

The interesting dynamic is that once many parties copy a template, it stops being a competitive advantage and becomes a minimum requirement. In a region where a growing share of teams field diaspora players, not having any becomes a disadvantage rather than a neutral choice.

Meanwhile, a service layer is forming around the template: intermediaries specialising in ancestry tracing, specialists in change-of-association procedure, advisers on citizenship law for players with two or three nationalities in the family tree. It is a niche market nobody has named yet, and it is growing.

The window for this template in Southeast Asia, in my assessment, runs roughly one to three years before it becomes standard practice and stops creating separation. After that, advantage returns to where it has always belonged: youth development quality, domestic league organisation, and the ability to keep players inside the system.

What I brought back from Senayan

I returned to my seat in the press row after training ended. Walking out of the complex, I thought about something unrelated to law: a reporter cannot see a player's citizenship from the touchline. He can only see foot rhythm, positioning, and the space a player creates or leaves behind.

For Vietnam, what to track in the coming months is not another article about a naturalisation file. It is what happens inside Indonesia's system: whether more diaspora cases clear in the next six months, whether FIFA's eligibility criterion comes under review, whether a European-born player of Vietnamese descent appears in a future squad list, and whether Indonesia's domestic players keep their places over the next two years.

Those four signals are observable with the naked eye and need no internal data. And they will tell us more about the regional balance of power than any ranking table.

I keep my old rule: read a player's name correctly before writing about him, and read the framework he stands inside before judging him.

Because a foot rhythm on grass does not lie. You just have to stand on the touchline long enough — and never mispronounce anyone's name.