When a Colonial Legacy Becomes an Advantage: Indonesia's Naturalization Gamble on Paes and Romeny

Gelora Bung Karno, September 5, 2026

Seventy thousand people packed the stands, and in the instant the penalty was awarded, the whole stadium went quiet in the way only very crowded places can. Maarten Paes stood on the line, arms slightly open, eyes on the ball. He saved it. Jakarta exploded.

I watched that match from a small cafe in Jing'an district, Shanghai, sitting beside three Indonesian university students studying there. When Paes dived, one of them slammed his hand on the table hard enough to ripple my milk tea. None of them mentioned Nijmegen. None mentioned the Netherlands, or the Under-21s, or the federation transfer FIFA approved that August. In that moment, Paes was simply their goalkeeper.

The next morning, the Indonesian press woke up with a different question entirely. Not about reflexes, footwork, or angles. About blood.

That was the beginning of one of the most interesting football debates in Southeast Asia in years: what happens when a national team suddenly improves through people who do not carry the face the crowd pictures when the anthem plays?

I am writing this not to retell a news item. I am writing because I have spent nearly thirty years on the edge of pitches, in dressing rooms, in corridors cameras never enter, and I know one thing: stories that look like paperwork are often the stories that decide the fate of an entire football nation.

The road Indonesia chose

To understand what is happening, it has to be placed in a context longer than a single match.

Indonesia, Southeast Asia's most populous football nation, spent nearly two decades in a state of waiting. They reached the World Cup in 2026 as the Dutch East Indies, and since then there has been a silence so long that people treat the memory almost as folklore. While Japan, South Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Australia built stable railways, Indonesia kept stumbling between federation administrations, domestic leagues suspended over governance disputes, and generations of talent burned out too early.

Then, from around 2026, the track changed direction. The Indonesian football federation, under chairman Erick Thohir, launched a programme to recruit players of Indonesian descent playing in Europe. The list kept growing: Jordi Amat, Sandy Walsh, Shayne Pattynama, Marc Klok, Ivar Jenner, Rafael Struick, Justin Hubner, Nathan Tjoe-A-On, Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk, Eliano Reijnders, Mees Hilgers, Jay Idzes, Kevin Diks. And two names at the centre of this story: Maarten Paes, a goalkeeper born in 2026, and Ole Romeny, a forward born in 2026.

In autumn 2026, in the first round of third-round qualifying for the 2026 World Cup in Jakarta, Indonesia faced Saudi Arabia, Australia, Bahrain, China and Japan. They took points. They caused problems. They kept a clean sheet against Australia. They forced people to talk about them in a way Southeast Asia had not talked about Indonesia in more than twenty years.

And then, just as everything seemed clear, the law tapped football on the shoulder.

Two gates and one family line

What most fans miss: a player of foreign origin who wants to represent a national team must pass through two independent gates, guarded by two entirely different systems.

The first gate is the citizenship law of the country itself. In Indonesia, that is Law No. 12 of 2026 on Citizenship, whose Article 20 opens a route to naturalization in the national interest, attached to a procedure few football nations have: approval by the House of Representatives, the DPR. Naturalization in Indonesia is not a quiet administrative decision. It is a political event with minutes.

The second gate is FIFA's framework for eligibility to play for national teams, together with the one-time change-of-association mechanism for players who have represented another federation at youth level. The decisive criterion is a biological link to territory: a parent or grandparent born in the country the federation represents.

Both players passed both gates.

The crux is this: neither Indonesian law nor FIFA's regulations require a single drop of indigenous blood in the ethnic sense. Eligibility is established by place of birth, by a grandparent's birth certificate, not by skin colour or facial features.

Paes has a grandmother born in Indonesia. Romeny has a similar line through his mother's family. For the law, that is enough.

And here, one thing must be said clearly, because regional media rarely says it: a passport is a legal document. It does not measure patriotism, nor a sense of belonging. It answers one question only: do you have the right?

Maarten Paes: the hardest file in the cabinet

Of the two names, Paes took the more winding road.

He was born on May 17, 2026 in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Raised inside the Dutch development system, he played for the Netherlands Under-21s. For a goalkeeper, having played youth international football is a serious legal obstacle, because it triggers the change-of-association mechanism, which is permitted only once in a career and only under narrow conditions.

Paes's file therefore sits at the edge of the rules. He is not a case that can be copied easily from a legal text. He is a case that requires reading the law down to the last comma. FIFA approved his change of association in August 2026, once every condition was met.

What stands out is that the Indonesian federation pursued the file over a long period, with a persistence observers describe as unusually stubborn. That is a cost no balance sheet records: time, relationships, negotiation, paperwork, and the endurance of people who are not allowed to lose.

On September 5, 2026, everything closed inside one dive.

Paes debuted in a 1-1 draw with Saudi Arabia. He saved a penalty. He kept a clean sheet against Australia in a goalless draw in Jakarta. In the months that followed there were matches where he picked the ball out of his net several times, including a heavy defeat to Japan, but that does not erase a basic truth: a national team that had lived in anxiety about its goalkeeping suddenly had a man standing there with the calm of someone used to living under pressure.

For a national-team back line, where centre-backs often meet only days before a match, the steady presence of a goalkeeper can be the single most important binding element in the whole system. It is the kind of upgrade no statistics table fully describes, but anyone who has stood between the posts understands.

Ole Romeny and the second gate

If Paes took the winding road, Romeny took a shorter but louder one.

Born on June 20, 2026, raised in Dutch football with spells at NEC, Willem II, Emmen and then Utrecht, later Oxford United in England, Romeny is a modern forward: mobile, pressing, capable across the front line. He is not a classic centre-forward waiting inside the box.

In February 2026 he took the oath of Indonesian citizenship. Soon after he wore the national shirt and scored in a qualifying win. For a striker, a first goal is always the fastest way to erase an argument. No law, no press conference, no columnist explains your case better than the ball in the net.

A map of blood: the legacy of a colonial era

Here the story leaves football behind.

For centuries the Dutch East Indies was a racially and culturally mixed space. A portion of the European-descended population settled permanently in the colony, married locally, had children and grandchildren. When Indonesia won independence in 2026 and a large wave of migration followed in the 1950s, hundreds of thousands from that community moved to the Netherlands. Those who stayed long-term and never left are given a specific name by historians.

The result is an Indo-Dutch community numbering in the hundreds of thousands, mostly Dutch nationals, Dutch-speaking, living in Europe, yet still holding blood connections to cities and towns across Indonesia.

For football, that is a mine.

Indonesia is tapping what I call geographic inheritance: an advantage that lies not in pitches, not in broadcast revenue, but in the fact that history accidentally left them a network of bloodlines spread across one of Europe's most developed football nations.

Vietnam does not share that inheritance. French rule also produced migration waves, but the Vietnamese community in Europe largely formed later, tied to twentieth-century upheavals, and more importantly: France at that time was not a football development power of the scale of modern Netherlands. Inheritance is always specific, sometimes cruelly so.

The economics of a deal with no transfer fee

This is the part I think the transfer industry has not analysed enough.

The transfer market is where promises are signed in ink, and trust is signed in blood. With Paes and Romeny, no such paper was signed. No deal was booked. No transfer fee. No amortisation schedule.

But that deal had a price.

The first cost is administrative: pushing files through the citizenship system, persuading parliament, preparing legal dossiers for FIFA, pursuing change-of-association steps. Those are working nights nobody puts on a scoreboard.

The second cost is political capital. Every time a legislator presses the button to approve a naturalization in the national interest, the federation spends part of its credibility inside the political system. That credibility is finite, and it must be recharged with results.

The third cost, which I believe is the largest and least discussed, is the opportunity cost of development. Every national-team slot given to a naturalized player is a slot not given to a player raised in a domestic academy.

In purely economic terms, this is an extremely efficient deal on paper. In a market where a young striker with fewer than fifty top-flight appearances can be valued in the hundreds of millions, acquiring a goalkeeper and a forward for no transfer fee is the kind of business that makes every sporting director jealous.

But efficiency on paper is not efficiency on grass, and this is where I want to pause.

I do not believe in the young-player price bubble in the simple sense that it will burst. I believe it is shifting: the enormous money aimed at unproven young players is being pushed into another channel, one where the transfer fee is zero but the cost sits in law, politics and time. Indonesia is not paying players. Indonesia is paying for the right to ask.

Positional leverage: why a goalkeeper and a centre-forward

One technical detail deserves more attention than it gets: of all positions on the pitch, goalkeeper and centre-forward are the two where a single player can change results the most.

A winger, however good, still needs a finisher. A centre-back, however good, still needs a keeper behind him. But a goalkeeper keeping a clean sheet in a match where his team scores once is a win. A striker scoring in the eighty-ninth minute is two points rescued.

So the fact that Indonesia's recruitment programme aimed precisely at those two spine positions says something about the quality of the planning. They did not buy cheap, easily replaceable roles. They reinforced the spine.

The 3-5-2 revolution does not begin with players; it begins with eyes that can see far.

When I covered Shanghai SIPG in 2026, under a coach who moved to a back three, I saw first-hand what happens to a young forward when the system changes around him. He went seven matches without scoring. Nobody explained to him that his role in the new shape was entirely different in space and running rhythm. I stayed in the dressing room for two hours after a defeat, listening to him talk. By the end of the season he had scored six.

The lesson I carried away is simple: tactics are a matter of eyes, but football is a matter of lungs. A formation is only beautiful on the whiteboard if the people executing it understand why they must run there.

Vietnam in the mirror

For Vietnamese fans, the Indonesian story is not somebody else's.

In the second round of 2026 World Cup qualifying, Vietnam and Indonesia shared a group with Iraq and the Philippines. In March 2026, Indonesia beat Vietnam twice: once in Jakarta, once in Hanoi by three goals. That was a shock I believe will be retold for years in Vietnamese football conversations, not because of the scoreline, but because of the helplessness.

Indonesia advanced. Vietnam stopped.

Interestingly, Vietnam also entered the naturalization path, but through an entirely different door. Nguyen Xuan Son, a Brazilian-born striker, came to Vietnam to play, served his residency, and became a Vietnamese citizen through long-term residence rather than bloodline. He debuted for the national team in late 2026, scored in his first match, and became a key figure in Vietnam's Southeast Asian championship run in early 2026, before a broken leg in the first leg of the final ended his tournament in the cruellest way.

Alongside him are other cases: a goalkeeper born in Czechia, a defender born in France, names carrying both Vietnamese and European blood. Vietnam's route is therefore a hybrid: residence, bloodline and family feeling.

And here is where I want to say something plainly, out of fairness to both sides.

If indigenous bloodline is the yardstick, the Nguyen Xuan Son deal could be seen as further from the roots than either Paes or Romeny. Yet the Vietnamese public's response to him was far warmer than the way the Indonesian press sometimes treats players with clearer Indonesian blood. That is a paradox of perception, and it deserves analysis more than criticism.

The paradox has reasons. Xuan Son arrived in Vietnam young, lived there for years, learned the language, ate the food, endured the heat and dust of training grounds. He became part of the daily story. Paes and Romeny appeared on a direct flight from Europe, in the national shirt, in front of television cameras, without a long stretch of time for audiences to grow used to them.

The feeling of belonging, it turns out, is built by time rather than paperwork. But time is precisely what international football no longer has the patience to provide.

The Shanghai lesson: China's far more expensive gamble

I live in Shanghai, and I have had a close view of a similar experiment conducted here.

From 2026, Chinese football entered a naturalization wave with names such as Elkeson, Alan, Aloisio and Fernando, alongside Europe-born players like Jiang Guangtai and Li Ke. On paper it was one of Asia's most ambitious naturalization programmes. In cost, it was almost unimaginable: contracts signed during the spending boom of Chinese football, salaries paid with state-linked corporate money, expectations set at the level of the world's second-largest economy.

The result: China did not go to the 2026 World Cup.

By the 2026 qualifying campaign, China's national team was still struggling, and in Jakarta on June 5, 2026, it was Indonesia that beat China in a match that ended Chinese hopes in the third round. The Chinese around me in Shanghai that night were silent. Nobody cursed the naturalized players. Nobody used them as a sacrifice. People simply sighed the way people sigh when they realise money cannot buy time.

I tell this story to place two models side by side.

China's model bought with wages, with residency, with big contracts. It was expensive in cash flow and it was not anchored to any specific fan community, because those naturalized players mostly had no relatives, no family, no local memory where they wore the shirt.

Indonesia's model paid in paperwork, in law, in diplomacy and in a family line. It is cheaper in cash and stronger emotionally, because when Paes stands in his goal, in Nijmegen there is a grandmother who was once born in an Indonesian town. A thin thread, but which thread is not thin?

China bought players. Indonesia got relatives back. In the football market those are two entirely different price tags, and the lesson of the past two decades is that the cheaper tag is producing the better return.

Contrarian angle one: the so-called "loophole" is a design

Now to my strongest argument.

In most regional coverage, the Paes and Romeny story is told with two words: legal loophole. That framing suggests Indonesia found a crack, slipped through, and obtained something that should not have been theirs.

Technically, that framing is wrong.

The criterion allowing a player to represent a national federation when a grandparent was born on that federation's territory is part of FIFA's rules governing the application of its statutes. It exists deliberately, written to address a historical reality: borders change, people move, and many families around the world have roots elsewhere than where they now live.

If that criterion were a bug, FIFA would have fixed it years ago. The fact that they have not, and that federations from Europe to Africa to Asia use it, shows it is part of the design.

What matters here is not morality but definition. Nationality and ethnicity are two different concepts, and in international football what is checked is nationality, plus a legal link to territory. Nationality itself already implies choice, granting and acceptance. A country deciding whom to naturalize is exercising its right, and FIFA merely sets a minimum connection threshold to protect the legitimacy of national teams.

In other words: Indonesia did not find a loophole. Indonesia read carefully a book most others only skim.

Contrarian angle two: the oil well will run dry

This is the risk I consider the biggest, and the one almost no Southeast Asian outlet is willing to write about.

Indonesia's resource in this story is a finite historical population.

The Indo-Dutch community was formed in a specific era and ended at a specific moment. The number of people born directly in the Dutch East Indies is ageing. The grandchild generation is still large, but the great-great-grandchild generation will not reach football age for decades, if the rules allow them at all.

This is the point I believe matters most to anyone analysing Indonesia's strategy: that flow does not regenerate. It is not like an academy, producing a new class every year. It is like a mineral deposit.

And when a country builds a national team on a mineral deposit, it must answer a question no administrator likes to hear: what replaces it when the deposit runs out?

The right answer lies in academies. In a domestic league strong enough that young players do not have to leave too early. In a coaching system good enough that a twenty-year-old native Indonesian can compete for a place with a same-aged player trained in Utrecht.

If Indonesia uses this window to pay down its academy debt, they will become a durable Asian force. If they merely live off the deposit, they will reach a ceiling they themselves can see.

On empty-stadium days I hear the team breathing clearly, and it is still beating. That breathing does not come from flights between Amsterdam and Jakarta. It comes from youth sessions in Sleman, in Bandung, on pitches with twenty spectators and three people filming.

Contrarian angle three: the lights do not buy goals

One detail should sit at the centre of every Southeast Asian naturalization debate.

In October 2026, Indonesia entered the fourth qualifying round with the strongest squad they had fielded in decades. They lost 2-3 to Saudi Arabia. They lost 0-1 to Iraq. And the 2026 World Cup dream closed.

This does not invalidate the naturalization programme. Indonesia went further than Vietnam, further than China, further than the rest of Southeast Asia in that campaign. But it puts things in proportion.

A good goalkeeper does not score. A good striker does not save. A national team with a strong spine but thin surroundings can still go further and then stop exactly where thin teams stop.

There are trophies you cannot lift, and they are still heavy in the heart. That is the title of those who stayed.

I use this not to mock. I use it to warn against a habit Southeast Asian football is especially prone to: reading one step forward as a guarantee. A quarter-final, an extra round, a draw against a strong team, are all data. But data is one thing, and a guarantee is another.

The arms race nobody names

There is a regional consequence I consider more serious than people realise.

Indonesia is not alone. The Philippines has used foreign-descended players for years. Malaysia has similar cases mixed with naturalization. Thailand is considering it. Singapore has bloodline and residency cases. And Vietnam already has a small but lengthening list.

When many federations run the same direction, everyone's advantage dilutes. If every Southeast Asian team naturalizes, what naturalization buys is no longer separation, only a raised floor. And when the floor rises, the value of internal development does not fall. It rises, because it is the only thing that cannot be copied with paperwork.

For years I sat in arguments between fans and organisers, and I always noticed one thing: the two sides were usually talking about different things. Fans talked about identity. Organisers talked about results. The bridge is only built when both must sit at the same table and look at the same sheet of numbers.

I stood in a crowd and understood that tears are also a language of love. At the 2026 World Cup I was in the tunnel after Japan lost to Belgium, watching a captain sit staring because he was thinking of thousands of supporters picking up rubbish in the stands. He did not talk about tactics. He talked about not having been worthy of them. That was the truest data of the evening, and it does not appear in any statistics table.

Southeast Asia has a chance to do the opposite: to talk about law, files and family lines, and still keep room for feeling.

Signals to track

The next group of players. Every federation announcement of a new name is data about how much is left in the mine. When announcements thin out, that is the earliest signal of the model's limit.

Movement around FIFA rules. If naturalization cases rise globally, pressure to review biological-connection criteria will appear. A discussion at council level could change the entire equation Indonesia is solving so well.

Regional federations' response. If Vietnam accelerates its overseas-Vietnamese list, it will mean the coaching staff is reading the same signal I am.

And finally, dressing-room cohesion. A national team can buy positions, but not habits. Habits form only when a centre-back knows exactly whether the man beside him will step up or drop off in a situation nobody has time to name.

A team has its own heartbeat, and I am the one who records it.

For Indonesia, that heartbeat is faster than ever. The only remaining question is whether it is fast because they are sprinting, or because they know only a short stretch remains before they must change pace.

And for the rest of Southeast Asia, Vietnam included, the matching question is harder: do we want to walk alongside someone else's pulse, or build a chamber strong enough to beat in our own rhythm?

I have no ready answer. But I know I will be at the edge of the pitch, notebook in hand, recording every beat.