Two Passports and One Gamble: Indonesia Is Buying Back Time

In August 2026, in Zurich, an administrative procedure closed with almost nobody in Southeast Asia paying attention. FIFA approved the federation transfer of Maarten Paes — a goalkeeper born in 2026 who had played for the Netherlands U21 side. Six months later, in February 2026, Ole Romeny took the oath in Jakarta to receive Indonesian citizenship. A goalkeeper. A centre-forward. The two positions with the greatest individual leverage on a football pitch, and both were filled by men not born on Indonesian soil.

I read the original Kompas report and then sat with it for a while. What made me stop was not the content, but the way Indonesian media framed the story: "exceptional case", "legal loophole", "no indigenous blood". That is not the language of a sports press room. That is the language of a tribunal trying to determine whether these two men belong where they now stand.

The pitch has no room for prejudice — only the ball, the tactics, and whoever dares to stand up. But before talking about the ball, we have to talk about paperwork, because here paperwork is what scores.

A reserve with three hundred years of provenance

Indonesia did not invent naturalisation. It is mining a seam that history left behind for it alone in the region.

For more than three centuries, the Dutch East Indies was a colony with a substantial European settler class. Dutch families who stayed long-term married locally, had children, and those children had children. After 2026, when Indonesia won independence, most of this group emigrated to the Netherlands. They were known as the "blijvers" — those who stayed. But in the passports of their descendants today there is a fact that cannot be erased: their biological grandparents were born on territory that the Indonesian football federation now governs.

That is the second gate. The "substantial connection" criterion in FIFA's regulations governing the application of the FIFA Statutes allows a player to represent a federation where a biological parent or grandparent was born. No indigenous blood required. No Indonesian language required. No ten years of residence required. Only a birth record of someone long since buried.

The first gate sits in Indonesian citizenship law. Law No. 12 of 2026, Article 20, permits naturalisation on grounds of "state interest" — an open-ended phrase, and attached to it is a parliamentary approval process. In other words, every state-interest naturalisation must pass through a chamber of legislators before it passes through a dressing room.

I stress this because it is routinely skipped in short reports: this is not a matter of a player simply deciding he wants it. It is a two-tier procedure, one national and one international, and both tiers closed lawfully for Paes and Romeny.

Two gates, a fee of zero

The economically striking point: there is no transfer fee anywhere in this story. Not one rupiah flowed from PSSI to the clubs holding Paes's or Romeny's contracts. No release clause was triggered. On the transfer ledger, both deals are priced at zero.

But the real cost is not there.

PSSI reportedly pursued Paes's file persistently over a long period, and for a goalkeeper who had played for the Netherlands U21 side, persistence is not enough. He had already played youth international football for another federation, meaning he needed one more procedure: a change of association, or federation switch. FIFA permits this only once in a career, and only if the player has never appeared in a senior official match for the old federation's national team. Paes's application was approved in August 2026.

This is the point I want readers to retain, including those who do not follow transfer law: for diaspora players who have already worn a European youth national shirt, the change-of-association mechanism — not the passport — is the real bottleneck. The passport is a necessary condition. The federation switch is the sufficient one.

For Romeny the path was more direct: he took the citizenship oath in February 2026 after the Indonesian parliament approved it. He did not face the complicated federation-switch barrier that Paes did.

And they do not stand alone. Paes and Romeny are the two loudest names in a larger group — alongside cases such as Haye, Verdonk and Diks — forming a generation of players born and raised in Europe, trained in Dutch professional academies, now wearing red and white. That lifts the technical floor of the Indonesian national team to a level the country's domestic football had never reached in ASEAN history.

Where do the two of them stand on the pitch? Goalkeeper and centre-forward. In football those are the two positions where one individual can swing a result the most. A good goalkeeper covers the errors of an inexperienced back line — something that happens almost every time at national-team level, where defenders train together only a few days per window. A sharp centre-forward converts one percent of chances into goals — and in knockout football, the side that exploits that one percent better goes through.

If you had to pick two positions to invest in, any analyst would pick exactly these two. On positional logic, this is a sound move.

What "stronger" means, and what nobody has measured

The report asserts that the naturalisation movement has significantly raised the national team's strength. Intuitively, I believe it. But I have not seen it measured.

Based on my experience watching Asian qualifiers over many years, I have developed a habit: whenever someone says a team is "stronger", I ask: by what? By FIFA ranking points? By expected goals created per match? By chance-conversion rate? By points won in the third round of qualifying? The original report offers none of those figures. It offers a judgement, and a judgement is not data.

That does not make the judgement wrong. It makes it unproven. And in football, the gap between "unproven" and "wrong" is usually filled by exactly one match.

There is another variable absent from the report: minutes. A national team has eleven starting slots and roughly five genuinely usable bench slots per match. Every naturalised player occupying a slot is a slot taken from a player developed in the domestic academy system. If Paes starts in goal, Indonesia's best domestic goalkeeper sits. If Romeny plays highest, Indonesia's best domestic forward sits. That is an ecological cost, invisible on any balance sheet, but it exists.

And there is a harder limit nobody mentions: the Dutch East Indies descendant pool is finite. It does not renew. Every player called up is a ballot drawn from a box that closed in 2026. Indonesia can mine it for ten or twenty more years, and then it runs dry. At that point the country must do what it is currently postponing: build academies.

Within the industry ecosystem, a new service niche is forming that no report names: genealogy scouts. Digging up colonial-era birth records, cross-referencing archives in The Hague, verifying bloodlines sufficiently to clear the FIFA gate. It is a new, narrow profession, and it will boom as ASEAN federations race to find descendants. A replicable model will be replicated.

A "loophole" is a design, not a bug

This is where I want to push back directly on how the media, regional media included, has framed this.

The word "loophole" in the report is an opinion, not a legal event. The grandparent-birthplace criterion is a rule FIFA designed deliberately, has existed for a long time, and applies to more than 200 member federations. It exists because football is a sport of migration — because millions of people leave their homeland and still want their descendants to represent the place their grandparents were born. Calling it a loophole is like calling traffic law a loophole in the pavement.

And here is the dispositive legal point: eligibility is not indigeneity. The two concepts differ, and FIFA has never made the second a condition. Paes and Romeny cleared two independent gates — Indonesian citizenship law and FIFA's eligibility regulations — and both gates closed lawfully.

What should worry observers is not legal. It is reputational.

The real risk is asymmetric. These two successful cases give Indonesia a goalkeeper and a forward. A future failed case — a file with a documentary gap, an eligibility dispute dragged into the light — would not take away one player. It would take away belief in the entire strategy, and it would hand naturalisation opponents a rhetorical weapon they have long sought. The damage from one failure outweighs the benefit of many successes combined.

Alongside that sits a regional risk: the arms race. The Philippines has used the mixed-heritage model for years. Malaysia too. Thailand and Singapore are watching. When multiple federations exploit the same model, each one's advantage shrinks — not because anyone got weaker, but because everyone got stronger. And if the naturalisation wave grows large enough, FIFA could be pushed to tighten the criterion. Indonesia is building an advantage on a rule it does not control.

The lights are off, but life goes on

I have to say something my position as a female sports journalist obliges me to say.

This entire story — hundreds of hours of paperwork, parliamentary approval, negotiation with FIFA, a federation transfer pursued across years — revolves around two male players. That is men's football's right. But look sideways.

How many hours of paperwork, how many meetings, how much political capital did the Indonesian women's national team receive over the same period? How much did Vietnam's women's team — a 2026 Women's World Cup participant — receive? Most female players in this region still train on empty pitches, still take second jobs to fund their passion, still play without spectators. The lights are off, but life goes on.

None of this diminishes what Paes and Romeny have achieved. It simply places two truths side by side: men's football has administrative doors standing open, while women's football has doors that were never installed. When the question is who "belongs" to a nation, women's football has been debating it for a century — and has always been the side required to prove more.

Every passage of play is a piece of a puzzle, and every piece is a life waiting to be acknowledged. For Paes and Romeny, acknowledgement arrived, with a passport attached. For hundreds of female players across the region, it is still waiting.

What Vietnam should take from this

For Vietnam, this is a scouting report, not entertainment news.

Vietnam has no equivalent reserve. French colonial history left a Vietnamese diaspora in France, the United States, Australia and Canada — but the number of Vietnamese-heritage players in top European leagues at national-team standard can be counted on one hand. Indonesia's source is structurally richer, and this is an advantage Vietnam cannot manufacture through administrative effort.

Thailand sits in a similar position, with one difference: its academy system has produced players who moved to Europe through development, not through passports. These are two competing philosophies, and over the next decade the region will generate data on which endures.

That means Vietnam must compete on another path: cohesion, stability, and a genuine youth academy. It is the slower road. But it does not depend on a birth record from 2026, and it does not vanish when a FIFA regulation changes.

There is one question I think both PSSI and the Vietnam Football Federation should ask themselves, in two different ways: if our strategy succeeds completely over the next ten years, what will the national team look like, and what will it be standing on?

Indonesia is buying time. It is a clever move, well executed, and entirely legal. But bought time must be repaid in earned time. I write about football to record the people who dare to dream in a world that has not made room for them — and here, the dreamer is a federation trying to compress thirty years of history into three years of paperwork.