Paes, Romeny and the Passport Pipeline: Indonesia Is Rebuilding Its National Team from a Finite Reserve

In February 2026, I rewatched the footage of the oath ceremony in Jakarta. Ole Romeny stood upright, his right hand raised, reading the pledge in Indonesian with every syllable sounding rehearsed. He did not smile. Behind him, a row of officials sat rigid. I rewound it four times — not to check whether he read it correctly, but to listen to his breathing. There was a very short pause before the final syllable, the pause of a man who had just traded an entire life for a different line on a passport.

Six months earlier, in Dallas, a goalkeeper born in 2026 named Maarten Paes completed a change of association. FIFA approved it in August 2026. In Vietnam the news passed by quickly, folded into a few short bulletins of the “Indonesia strengthens its squad” variety. I kept it. Read those two lines closely and a far longer story appears than any transfer brief can hold.

There is a lesson I carried out of Luzhniki, on the night I mispronounced Luka Modrić’s name three times on live television: Luzhniki taught me that every move begins with a bad touch. Since then I have made a habit of reading the details a spreadsheet cannot measure — the scrape of studs along a corridor, the sigh after the final whistle — and writing them into a separate notebook. Paes and Romeny are two such lines.

To understand what is happening in Jakarta, you have to start with a regulation very few people outside the industry notice: the right to play for a national team is not granted by blood, but by administrative geography. FIFA requires that a player representing a federation have a biological parent or grandparent born on that federation’s territory. Nowhere in those rules is the player obliged to carry indigenous blood, to speak the local language fluently, or ever to have lived there.

On the Indonesian side, the second door is Citizenship Law No. 12/2026. Article 20 permits naturalisation on grounds of national interest, subject to approval by the House of Representatives. It is an administrative door, not an emotional one. Romeny walked through it in February 2026.

Behind those two doors lies a reserve no other Southeast Asian football nation possesses at comparable scale. For more than three centuries the Netherlands ruled the East Indies. After sovereignty was transferred in 2026, hundreds of thousands of Indo-Dutch people — the group known as blijvers, those who had settled long-term — left the archipelago and resettled in the Netherlands. Their descendants today form a Dutch-speaking community raised inside the Dutch football system, yet with grandparents born on Indonesian soil. Legally, they satisfy FIFA’s criteria. Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk, Kevin Diks, Maarten Paes and Ole Romeny all come from that stream.

The most telling detail in the two latest cases is not the names, but the positions. Paes is a goalkeeper. Romeny is a centre-forward. Those are the two roles with the greatest single-player leverage on a result: a settled number one steadies a back line that trains together only a few dozen days a year, while a centre-forward decides whether a compact block converts into goals at all. Spending a naturalisation slot on a full-back or a winger burns resources; spending it on a goalkeeper and a striker reinforces the spine. The leadership of the Indonesian Football Association understood this.

Paes’s case is, legally, the more delicate. He has played for Dutch youth teams, which meant naturalisation alone was not enough; he needed a change of association, a procedure permitted only once in a career and subject to FIFA approval. That file was cleared in August 2026, after a sustained pursuit by the Indonesian federation. Anyone who has handled an international file knows the real cost of a change of association lies in time, in grandparents’ birth certificates, and in the patience of everyone involved — never in a transfer fee.

Based on my experience covering matches in Southeast Asia, the way the Indonesian federation operated deserves credit on organisational grounds: it passed through two separate legal systems, secured the House of Representatives’ signature, then secured FIFA’s, for two different men, across two different windows. That is administrative competence, not luck.

But a gap opens up in how the story is told. Indonesian outlets state that the naturalisation wave has markedly lifted the national team’s strength. That strength is asserted, not measured. No FIFA ranking points, no qualifier results, no comparison sample is offered to quantify the uplift. In my trade, a judgement without a comparison sample is an unfinished judgement.

And there is something both sides rarely mention: this pipeline is finite. The grandparent-born-on-territory condition is tied to a historical period that closed in 2026. The supply does not renew itself on an academy cycle. Indonesia is mining a reserve of known quantity, and every slot spent is a slot that does not come back.

Most Indonesian press calls this a “legal loophole”, a phrase implying rule-bending. That description is technically inaccurate. The grandparent birthplace criterion is a rule FIFA designed deliberately, not a system error, and it has survived several generations of players. What the public is really arguing about is not legality but representation: a man with no indigenous blood can be a valid Indonesian international — true in law, but not necessarily easy on the ear in the stands.

The real risks of this model sit in three other places. First, a naturalisation slot given to a grown player is a slot taken from a domestic one, and if that repeats often enough, the incentive to invest in academies thins out. Second, the Philippines and Malaysia are walking the same road, which means any single nation’s advantage will be diluted. Third, reputational risk is asymmetric: two successful files buy only two doses of reassurance, while one failed file can trigger a federation scandal.

For Vietnamese football, this is a direct competitive signal, not a sideshow. The French Indochina legacy also left a Vietnamese diaspora overseas, but that community is far smaller, and most of it did not grow up inside an elite football system. Vietnam has no equivalent reserve to tap at this speed. Put differently: if Indonesia is buying time with passports, Vietnam must pay with its own time — with academies, with youth leagues, with the cohesion of a group of players who grew up together from under-16 level. That is a different race, a slower one, and no bulletin board covers it.

The rhythm of a match is only audible when you put your ear to the grass. Those empty May stadiums taught me: football is a conversation, not a monologue. Indonesia has been speaking very loudly these past months, and it has every right to — the work was methodical, lawful, procedural. But a conversation only endures while both sides still have a voice. If the squad list gradually becomes a meeting place for men from another continent, the rest of that conversation — the stands, the academies, the children playing on dirt pitches in Makassar — will fall quiet. And the loudest applause does not come from the stands, but from the empty seats.