Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny and the Historical Border of Indonesian Football

In March 2026 I sat in a football bar in Nanshan district, Shenzhen, watching Indonesia host Bahrain. The man next to me, Cantonese by origin, asked the one question I have heard a hundred times in seven years of living here: “Is that goalkeeper Indonesian or Dutch?” I did not answer. I pointed at the screen, where Maarten Paes had just caught a cross and launched a ball more than forty metres onto the right winger's foot within four seconds. The Jakarta crowd erupted. He nodded: “Good keeper.”

A question about passports, an answer about craft. All that week the two stories ran side by side in the Indonesian press and almost never met.

On 12 February 2026, Ole Romeny took the Indonesian citizenship oath in London. The forward, born in 2026 and then at Oxford United, completed the paperwork before making his first appearance in red and white. Nearly a year earlier, in April 2026, Maarten Paes — the FC Dallas goalkeeper born in 2026 — began his change-of-association procedure, and in August 2026 FIFA formally approved it.

Kompas called both men “exceptional cases”, stressed that neither carries indigenous blood, and used the phrase “legal loophole”.

Two layers need separating here. The first is Indonesian nationality law, specifically Article 20 of Law No. 12/2026, which permits naturalisation on grounds of national interest with approval from the House of Representatives, the DPR. The second is FIFA's rule on representing a national team: a player is eligible if a parent or biological grandparent was born on that federation's territory. Paes had played for the Netherlands U21, so he had to pass through the narrower gate — a one-time change of association. Romeny took the ordinary route.

Both passed. Both are lawful. And that is precisely what makes the story more interesting than the way it is being told.

The positions Indonesia chose to import are the two most expensive positions on the pitch: goalkeeper and centre-forward. In every player-valuation model I have read, those two sit at the peak. A good goalkeeper hides the error rate of an entire back line — and at national-team level, where four defenders meet a few days before kick-off, that error rate is always higher than at club level. A good centre-forward turns three chances into two goals — and in World Cup qualifying, where only a handful of matches per group truly decide anything, that conversion rate is worth a whole system.

In other words: Indonesia did not import players. Indonesia imported a spine.

In 2026 I paid my own way to Moscow and sat in the Luzhniki stands. From the Luzhniki stands I learned that a formation is only paper while the match lives in people. Here there is one more layer. When you replace two vertebrae of the spine with two players trained in Europe, you are not simply raising quality — you are raising the technical floor of the whole team. Indonesian defenders know the man behind them is comfortable with the ball at his feet; midfielders know the man ahead of them times runs to a European rhythm. The change shows up in decisions, not in metrics.

Based on my own experience tracking matches, I always re-check the footage afterwards. Against Bahrain, the distance between Indonesia's back line and Paes when the team pushed high was roughly eighteen metres — a figure a domestically developed goalkeeper with little international exposure rarely dares to hold. Paes held it. He played as if he had been there ten years.

What does this route cost? There is no transfer fee. That is its most attractive feature and its least discussed one. Indonesia paid no club a single cent. What it paid was administrative cost, political-lobbying cost and time — the PSSI pursued Paes's file for an extended period, exactly as the press describes it, persistently. A country that cannot afford to buy a striker can still afford a passport.

But this is where I want to linger a little longer.

Calling it a “legal loophole” is technically wrong, and that error hides the real risk. The grandparent-birthplace criterion is a designed rule, not a system bug. It exists because federations want to keep ties with emigrant communities — a logic European, African and South American football has used for decades. When someone calls it a loophole, they are arguing about identity, not about law.

And Indonesia's real risk is not in a courtroom. It lies elsewhere: their supply is finite and non-renewable. The Indo-Dutch community, the people known as blijvers — descendants of settlers from the Dutch East Indies era — is a historical population that has already closed. Every player called up is a vote spent. Indonesia can mine Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk, Kevin Diks, but it cannot produce more grandparents. This model runs for five years, ten years, and then must return to youth development.

A second risk is single-point dependency. When you bet on the two most important positions, you also bet on two sets of knees. An injury to Paes would not be read as losing a goalkeeper; it would be read as losing the entire “raising the national team” story the press tells every week. Every set piece is a puzzle and I am only the man reading the pieces on the pitch — but this piece is not on the pitch. It is in a file.

A third risk, and I think the most troubling: Southeast Asian football is racing with the same formula. The Philippines have done it for years. Malaysia are doing it. When every federation goes looking for a grandmother in Europe, the first mover's advantage thins very quickly — and FIFA, under pressure from federations with no diaspora, can tighten the criterion. That is the kind of risk no contract covers.

On the livestream nights of 2026, with stadiums empty and ten Champions League finals to dissect on a digital whiteboard, I learned something about reading football: historical data does not predict the future, it only shows what has previously withstood pressure. Indonesia have never withstood this pressure. They have never had a national team where an entire country's expectations rest on two men born twelve thousand kilometres from Jakarta.

For Vietnam, this is a signal to monitor, not a reason to panic. We have less footballing diaspora, but we have something money cannot buy quickly: a squad that grew up together and a youth system that has run for years. Two models, two speeds, two different kinds of risk.

Tactics are not a formula; they are a chess game in which the opponent changes the rules mid-match. Indonesia just changed the rules. Our job is to read the board carefully before the first goal is scored.

Indonesia's next qualifier will answer the question no newspaper can: whether Paes saves with his hands, or with his passport.