Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny and the Legal Door: Indonesia Is Trading Passports for a Future

On the night of 25 March 2026, at Gelora Bung Karno, Ole Romeny stabbed the ball into Bahrain's net from about seven metres. It was the only goal of the match. Three points for Indonesia in the third round of qualifying for the 2026 World Cup. A name that all of Jakarta suddenly knew.

Eighteen months earlier, no Indonesian supporter knew who he was. Romeny was born in Nijmegen, grew up in the NEC and then FC Utrecht academies, and played for Dutch youth teams. There is not a drop of indigenous Indonesian blood in his veins.

The domestic press calls this an “exceptional case” and a “legal loophole.” Both labels miss the most important detail. The path taken by Romeny and by goalkeeper Maarten Paes was designed, not discovered. The grandparent-birthplace criterion sits inside FIFA's regulations governing the application of the FIFA Statutes. The door has been open for years. People simply took four decades to push it.

Based on my experience watching Asian qualifiers from the stands and from a screen across nearly four decades, one conclusion is simple: in Southeast Asia, what people call “identity” is usually just a variable nobody has bothered to measure.

Context: decades of waiting, one change of direction

Indonesia has not played at a World Cup since 2026, when the country was still the Dutch East Indies. For twenty years, Indonesian football has lived in a familiar loop: some of Asia's biggest domestic crowds, a national team short of quality in exactly the decisive positions, and a qualifying campaign ending in failure every cycle.

The prevailing belief across Southeast Asian football is that strength must be grown, that growing takes twenty years, and that therefore one should simply wait. Tiki-taka did not die because it was defeated; it died because it was believed for too long. The belief that a national team may only be grown from domestic soil is dying the same way: not because anyone defeated it, but because people trusted it for decades without re-examining it.

PSSI chose differently. From 2026, the federation ran a programme to find players of Indonesian descent across Europe: descendants of Dutch, Indo and Eurasian families who once lived in the Dutch East Indies. Historians call that group the blijvers, those who stayed. Dozens of names followed: Jordi Amat, Sandy Walsh, Shayne Pattynama, Rafael Struick, Ivar Jenner, Justin Hubner, Calvin Verdonk, Thom Haye, Kevin Diks, Eliano Reijnders, Mees Hilgers.

The two most scrutinised cases are Maarten Paes and Ole Romeny. Neither has indigenous ancestry. Both are fully eligible.

Indonesia's direct regional rival took what looks like the opposite route. Vietnamese football built a large youth system from 2026 and harvested it with the 2026 AFF Cup, the 2026 AFC U23 runner-up finish and the 2026 ASEAN Cup title. Yet Vietnam has also naturalised: goalkeeper Filip Nguyen in 2026, striker Nguyen Xuan Son in late 2026, defender Jason Pendant in early 2026.

Three positions. Three moments. One logic. That is the context any serious analysis of Paes and Romeny has to sit inside.

Two gates, not one

To wear Indonesia's shirt, a foreign-born player must pass two entirely independent gates.

The first is Indonesian nationality law. Law No. 12 of 2026, Article 20, permits naturalisation in the national interest, subject to approval by the House of Representatives. This is an administrative mechanism, not a football one: it requires files, hearings, votes and a willing government. For Paes and Romeny, that process is complete.

The second is FIFA's regulation. A player may represent the federation where a parent or grandparent was born, where the player was born, or where the player has lived long enough under defined conditions. In these two cases, the qualifying link is a grandparent's birthplace. FIFA's biological test rests on geography of birth, not ethnicity. This is the point most amateur commentary gets wrong, and the point that makes “no indigenous blood” a factually true but legally meaningless description.

Paes's case is more delicate, and worth pausing on. Paes represented the Netherlands at Under-21 level. A player who has represented one federation at youth level must request a change of association, which FIFA grants only once, and only if the player has never appeared in an official senior match for the first federation. Paes was called up by Dutch youth teams at 22, uncomfortably close to the edge of certain provisions. FIFA processed and approved the file during 2026; published information indicates the federation switch was completed around August 2026. PSSI pursued the case persistently through several rounds of legal negotiation.

The true cost of that deal was never a transfer fee — that figure is zero. It sits in administrative capacity, in legal teams, in political capital spent on hearings, and in the reputation the federation staked.

In other words, this is a recruitment channel that bypasses the transfer market entirely. No club sells, no contract is bought, no fee is paid, and yet a goalkeeper with top-flight Dutch experience and an Eredivisie striker appear in a national-team squad.

Why goalkeeper and centre-forward

National teams train together for roughly eight to ten days per window. That is why strong national sides tend to be strongest in positions whose output depends on individuals more than on coordinated networks: goalkeeper, centre-back, centre-forward. A central midfielder is only as good as the system around him. A goalkeeper can be excellent while the system collapses into fragments.

The goalkeeper is the highest-leverage position on the scoreboard. One mistake costs a goal. Two saves win three points. In a back four that barely knows each other, a commanding keeper does more than stop shots: he keeps the four in front of him calm.

Paes and Romeny fill exactly those two holes. Paes, born in 2026, is at the peak age for a goalkeeper, a role in which form matures late and lasts. Romeny, born in 2026, is a penalty-box striker — precisely the profile Southeast Asian national teams chronically lack, sides that create chances without anyone to finish them.

Third-round qualifying results hint at the effect. Indonesia beat Saudi Arabia 2-0 in Jakarta, beat Bahrain 1-0 through Romeny, and beat China 1-0. For the first time in decades, Indonesia remained alive deep into the final stage of qualifying.

Still, honesty matters: “stronger” is an assertion, not a measurement. Nobody has published comparative data on chance quality before and after the naturalisation wave. Four decades of watching qualifiers taught me one thing: every national team gets stronger in the newspaper and weaker only on the scoreboard.

The Vietnamese mirror

While Indonesian media debated Paes's bloodline, Vietnam did the same thing with a different label.

Filip Nguyen, born in Czechia, naturalised in 2026, stands in goal. Nguyen Xuan Son, born Rafaelson in Brazil, naturalised in late 2026, became the tournament's leading striker at the 2026 ASEAN Cup with four goals in a handful of matches before breaking his leg in the second leg of the final. Jason Pendant Quang Vinh, born in France, naturalised in early 2026, plays left-back.

Goalkeeper, centre-forward, full-back. Same problem, same positional logic. The difference between the two federations lies not in principle but in the scale and quality of the ancestral talent pool.

Indonesia holds Southeast Asia's largest post-colonial Eurasian community, the product of three centuries of Dutch presence in the archipelago. These families typically carry mixed heritage, speak Dutch or English, and grew up inside one of Europe's stronger development systems. Vietnam's overseas community is larger in total numbers but concentrated in countries where professional football produces few elite players, and the conversion rate into professional footballers is far lower than in the Netherlands.

People ask why I bristle at the way naturalisation is narrated. I do not object to naturalisation; I object to how it turns fifteen years of academy investment into a morality tale instead of a resource calculation.

Finite supply, and nobody in Jakarta wants to hear it

Indonesia's model rests on a historical resource: the descendants of the blijvers, drawn from a population that no longer reproduces itself. The Eurasian community of the Dutch East Indies formed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and dispersed after 2026, when most left for the Netherlands. That community has one generation currently aged between thirty and forty. After that, it ends.

This is a non-renewable deposit. In ten years, the number of eligible players good enough for the national team will fall, even though FIFA's criterion remains untouched on paper. Economists call this a substitution effect: naturalisation substitutes for academy investment, and substitutes usually cost more than what they replace once long-run costs are counted.

Regional rivals will not stand still. The Philippines has used heritage players for years, with uneven output. Malaysia began rolling out a heritage-player programme in 2026 and 2026. Thailand is more cautious but has held public discussions. This race has an unpleasant property: an advantage loses value as more countries do the same thing.

At 61, I no longer have time for polite football on paper.

The fee nobody writes into the contract

There is no transfer fee for Paes or Romeny. There is another fee, and it is far larger than zero.

Indonesia applies a single-nationality norm to adults. To wear the national shirt, a player must give up his original passport — surrendering freedom of movement inside the EU, unrestricted labour rights, and in Paes's case part of a professional record built in the Netherlands. That is a far bigger personal decision than changing clubs.

That cost explains why some cases fail or drag, and why players previously capped at European youth level are the hardest group of all. They need sufficient willingness, sufficient sense of being overlooked in Europe, and a market value not yet large enough for a rejection of a major federation to be the rational alternative.

Where I could be wrong

Three things make me careful, and I want to state them plainly before concluding.

China tried this model before Indonesia and failed. Between 2026 and 2026, China naturalised a group of Brazilian players and several European-born players of Chinese descent, still missed the 2026 World Cup, and barely used the naturalised players in decisive matches. The lesson is blunt: a passport does not score goals. Integration, minutes and coach trust are the real variables. Indonesia now has a naturalised cohort larger than anything seen in Asia, and precisely because it is large, the risk of internal friction is larger too.

Second, the risk is asymmetric. Two successes deliver moderate benefit; one future eligibility failure would cause damage many times greater, because it turns a sporting story into a legal scandal. The best foundation PSSI can build right now is not more players but a due-diligence process so transparent that nobody can question it.

Third, the risk sits with FIFA itself. If the naturalisation wave spreads across Asia, pressure to tighten the grandparent-birthplace criterion will grow. I doubt it will happen. An Indonesia of 280 million people at a World Cup is a market FIFA craves, and the current criterion serves exactly that commercial objective. FIFA's rules are generally written to open doors for large markets, not to close them.

My final point, and possibly my biggest error: I believe Indonesia's binding constraint is politics, not law. Parliament can approve today and stall tomorrow, depending on public temperature. The phrase “legal loophole” is technically wrong, but it is a highly sensitive political indicator — a signal that part of the Indonesian public still has not accepted that legal and indigenous are two different concepts.

A test that can be verified

I offer three tests, verifiable within twenty-four months, and I am willing to be checked against them.

Count how many naturalisations PSSI completes in 2026. If the number drops sharply while the national team still has a World Cup path, the constraint is political rather than legal, as I predict. If the number rises, the model has automated itself and the political variable is smaller than I think.

Watch whether FIFA opens any review of the grandparent criterion. If silence holds through the end of 2026, commercial motive beat legal motive.

Watch what the VFF does. If Vietnam calls up more overseas-born players in 2026, the ASEAN naturalisation race has truly begun, and the winner will be the country with the best administrative machinery, not the most players.

The next qualifier will not answer that question. A passport will.