Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny and Indonesia's National-Team Blueprint: Reading the Rulebook Before Calling It a Loophole

On August 13, 2026, I sat down to work through the registration files of the Football Association of Indonesia and stopped at one short line: Maarten Paes, goalkeeper, born 2026, federation transfer from the Netherlands. A few months later, the same list gained another name: Ole Romeny, centre-forward, who swore the Indonesian citizenship oath in February 2026.

In the stadium tunnel, the noise cuts out entirely. Only the heartbeat of the match remains. And the heartbeat of the Indonesian national team, in Jakarta or Surabaya, is now kept by players who have never lived a full day in the country they will represent.

On my desk at the time were four sheets of paper. None listed a transfer fee. None listed a market value. Only dates, article numbers and signatures. Those four sheets told a story that the Indonesian media calls "exceptional cases", and that I call something else: planning.

A national team designed, not raised

Southeast Asia has never seen a precedent quite like this. The Philippines naturalised players en masse from the 2000s, but most were mixed-heritage footballers living abroad with uneven quality. Malaysia had a handful of isolated cases. Indonesia aimed at a very specific stratum: the descendants of Dutch settlers who remained long-term in the Dutch East Indies, the group historians call the "blijvers".

The crux sits here. The FIFA Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes, known as RGAS, allow a player to represent a federation if a biological parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory. That criterion does not require indigenous blood. Paes's grandfather having been born in the Dutch East Indies is enough.

In parallel, Indonesia's Citizenship Law No. 12 of 2026, specifically Article 20, opens an administrative door: parliament may approve naturalisation in the national interest. Paes was approved by parliament in April 2026, and FIFA confirmed his federation transfer in August of the same year. Romeny completed the domestic legal leg with his oath in February 2026. Two doors, two legal systems, two different routes, and both closed on schedule.

What stands out is that PSSI did not treat this as a gamble. They pursued Paes's file for months, persistently, across several levels. In my trade, the most expensive thing on the transfer market is not a contract. It is time.

Goalkeeper and striker: the two leverage positions

If you had to pick exactly two positions to strengthen a national team through naturalisation, almost every analyst would pick goalkeeper and centre-forward. These are the two roles with the highest single-player leverage in football: a steady goalkeeper can save three to five points in a qualifying campaign, a centre-forward who knows how to score can turn a draw into a win. Indonesia picked both correctly.

Structurally, this is how you build a spine. A national-team back line is usually an assembly of players who rarely play together, so the man in goal acts as the stabiliser. A goalkeeper pulls an entire defensive system onto one rhythm, and a naturalised slot in that position multiplies in value. Paes is 27, precisely the peak of the goalkeeping position, an age at which a keeper can go on for another seven or eight years.

Based on my experience watching matches in Asian World Cup qualifying, a national team with a European-league spine tends to win the games it used to draw: home fixtures against weaker opponents where it must break a deadlock. In Southeast Asia, that type of match accounts for nearly half the calendar.

Now the cost side. On the negotiating table, a goalkeeper starting in the Eredivisie carries a substantial fee, plus wages, plus agent fees, plus integration risk. Indonesia paid through another route: administrative cost, legal cost, and political capital. Converted, this is a recruitment channel with a zero transfer fee but a very high non-financial cost. That price never appears on any balance sheet, and that is why it is hard to copy.

But there is something most reports skip: this process has a biological ceiling. The supply is the descendants of Dutch settlers in the Indies. That is a historical, closed, non-renewable population. Every completed file is a ticket withdrawn from the box, permanently. A strategy built on a finite supply is strong at the opening and weak at the finish, unless it is paired with youth development.

Technically, Indonesia's naturalised cohort does not stop at two names. There are other cases in the same wave, most of them from European leagues. That lifts the team's technical floor to a level Southeast Asian football has never seen from Indonesia. But it carries a hidden price: minutes available to domestically developed players are compressed. Local players are not excluded; they are postponed.

There are mornings when I write down a player's footfalls, as if composing an instrumental score. The training ground does not lie. It simply waits for someone who knows how to listen. And there I learned that naturalisation is a long, quiet process, easiest to break at the final link: the dressing room.

The "loophole" does not exist, but the risk does

Indonesian media call these "exceptional cases", and some outlets use the phrase "legal loophole" outright. Technically, that description is wrong. The criterion of a grandparent born on the territory is a deliberately designed clause within FIFA's rulebook, built to serve specific migrant and post-colonial communities. It serves people of Kosovan, Algerian and Surinamese descent, and of course, those of Indies descent. The distinction between eligibility and indigenous blood is the decisive legal point, and here both players cleared both gates.

I will not rush to defend PSSI, though. Paes's file is subtler than it looks. He represented the Netherlands at under-21 level, meaning he needed a change of association, a one-way procedure usable once in a career. This is the kind of file that sits close to the edge of the rules; if FIFA's interpretation shifts, everything could look different. The real risk is not Paes or Romeny, but the files that come next.

The second risk is reputational. When a national team's two standout players are questioned over their origins, every defeat on the pitch gets attributed to the naturalisation policy. A 90th-minute concession in qualifying can be read as "this team has no roots". In football, reputational pressure is usually more expensive than legal pressure, because no verdict ever closes it.

Thirty pages save nobody, but whoever reads them keeps the rhythm. I once filed a report that long to an academy, and the lesson holds: what decides the outcome is not the paper, but whether someone is willing to read it and willing to change.

The third risk, the one that worries me most, is systemic. The Philippines went first, Malaysia is stirring, Thailand has not moved but is always watching. When several countries in a region use the same model, the model's value drops for each of them. If FIFA tightens the grandparent birth-territory criterion, the whole region loses a tool at once.

For Vietnam, this signal must be read with cold eyes. We have no Dutch diaspora to speak of. French colonial history left a different legacy, and most of our overseas community did not grow up inside European academies. Indonesia has a pipeline Vietnam cannot copy. That is a structural advantage, not a temporary one.

The signal to keep watching

The way Southeast Asia is learning from itself shows one thing: a national team is no longer the natural product of a domestic game. It is a project, with a schedule, a budget, a file. For Indonesia, the question is no longer whether Paes or Romeny are eligible, but how long their source keeps flowing, and who is being trained behind those passports to replace them.