Indonesia's Two Legal Gates: Paes, Romeny and the Limits of a Non-Renewable Resource

A foundational note before the analysis

Before anything else, I want to get the two central names right. Maarten Paes — "Maar-ten Paas", stress on the first syllable, the "ae" not stretched into "a-e". Ole Romeny — "Oh-leh Roh-meh-nee", the final "e" light, almost dissolving into the "n". I learned how to pronounce these Dutch names on a June evening in 2026, in Moscow, when I mispronounced Artem Dzyuba's name three times during the first half of the World Cup opening match.

Moscow taught me that preparation begins with getting other people's names right.

I did not want to repeat that mistake at 68. And I did not want this piece to fall into the easiest trap: treating those two Dutch names as a pure football story, when in fact it is a story about paperwork, about colonial history, and about a non-renewable resource.

In February 2026 I sat in my Chengdu apartment reading a list of names out loud. Outside the window, Sichuan snow fell thin as dust. The list contained Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny, Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk, Kevin Diks. Five European names sitting side by side in a report about the Indonesia national team. I read each one slowly, as if preparing for a match I would not play in but would have to describe to hundreds of thousands of listeners.

That was when I understood the story was not on the pitch.

It was in the records room.

Part One — Context: a table whose weights are shifting

To understand why those two names cause so much noise, they must be placed in the right frame. Southeast Asia is a region where World Cup qualifying places number only a handful, and every place is paid for with decades of investment. Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia — five football nations that once sat close together on a shared plane of level, resources, and method.

Over two decades, Vietnam built its standing on a different road: systematic youth development, from the Hoang Anh Gia Lai academy through PVF to VFF's own centres, a golden generation born out of those furnaces. Thailand took the strong domestic league route with Thai League as its spine. The Philippines naturalized early, from the era of American-Filipino players in the 2000s and 2010s, but the returns were never stable because tactical depth was missing.

Indonesia chose a third road, and by 2026–2026 that road began to show its shape.

I have followed Southeast Asian football long enough to know that no nation here changes within a single transfer window. The rhythm of regional football is measured in decades, not weeks. But some years break the curve, and I believe 2026–2026 is such a year for Indonesia.

What is striking is how that wave arrived: it was not loud like a blockbuster signing, with no lavish unveiling, no transfer fee. It happened in Indonesia's parliamentary committee rooms, in legal documents, in the birth certificates of grandparents from eighty or ninety years ago.

For someone in my trade, that is the best kind of story. It does not sit in the scoreline. It sits in the footnote most readers skip.

Part Two — The first gate: Citizenship Law No. 12/2026

The first gate Paes and Romeny had to pass was Indonesian law.

The foundation of this gate is Law No. 12 of 2026 on Citizenship. Within it sits a provision allowing naturalization on grounds of "national interest" — and this is where the story shifts from legal technique to political will.

The mechanism works like this: a foreign national seeking citizenship under this special track cannot simply file an application. The file must go through the House of Representatives — the DPR, Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat — and must be approved by a vote of the legislators themselves. This is a heavy, slow administrative process that requires genuine political mobilization.

In other words, every naturalization case in Indonesia is not a paperwork matter. It is a political decision with someone accountable for it.

In the case of Paes and Romeny, both travelled the same route: file submitted to the DPR, legislators voting, decision issued, Indonesian citizen created in law.

What I want to stress here — and this is what many domestic reports skip — is that Indonesian law does not require indigenous blood. No clause in Law No. 12/2026 demands that a naturalized person carry an "indigenous" element. What that law requires is that the applicant meets conditions of residence, legality, and standing, and that the legislature confirms their citizenship serves the national interest.

National interest here is defined broadly. It includes football.

As an outside observer, I see this as the crux. In many Southeast Asian nations, the concept of "national interest" is bound tightly to politics, economics, and security. In Indonesia between 2026 and 2026, that concept was explicitly extended to sport, and specifically to the men's national football team.

When a country defines national-team achievement as part of its national interest, naturalization stops being administration. It becomes part of a development strategy.

Part Three — The second gate: FIFA's regulations

If Indonesian law is the first gate, FIFA is the second, and this is the gate the public cares about most.

The relevant rules sit in FIFA's regulations governing the application of the FIFA Statutes — commonly abbreviated as RGAS. Within them is the "substantial connection" requirement a player must demonstrate to represent a national federation.

There are several ways to prove that connection. One is: the player was born on the federation's territory; a parent was born there; or a grandparent was born there.

This is the single most important point in the whole story, and I want to slow down.

The "grandparent born on the federation's territory" criterion is a deliberate design choice by FIFA. It is not a technical error. It is not an overlooked loophole. It exists because FIFA has long recognized that populations move, that national borders change, and that diaspora communities have a right to keep a thread to the place their ancestors were born.

Which means that when Indonesian media call the Paes and Romeny cases "exceptional cases" or "legal loopholes", the phrasing is emotionally accurate but technically wrong.

There are two gates, not one. And both gates were designed to open for certain cases.

Part Four — The Maarten Paes case: the narrowest gate

Of the two names, Paes is the legally more complex case. And the more interesting one for someone in my trade.

Maarten Paes was born in 2026. He is a goalkeeper. And he has represented the Netherlands at U21 level.

That last detail changes everything. When a player has already represented one national federation at youth level, switching to represent another is no longer simple. It must pass through a separate FIFA mechanism: change of association.

This mechanism allows a player to switch national representation once in a career, under a tight set of conditions about matches played, age at the time of playing, and the competitions involved.

Paes played for the Netherlands U21. He wore the youth shirt at 22 — an age that in some football cultures still counts as a young player, but in others is already mature. That age detail is not trivial. It sits at the very edge of the change-of-association conditions, and this is where I believe every report on Paes should be read again carefully against the original text.

In August 2026 FIFA approved Paes's change of association. The narrowest gate had opened.

What I want to add about Paes is his position. Goalkeeper. In football, two positions carry the greatest single-player influence on results: goalkeeper and centre-forward. The goalkeeper because he touches the ball at destiny-moments; the striker because he is the last to touch it before a goal is born.

Indonesia chose to reinforce exactly those two positions.

For a national back line whose familiarity is usually low — players arriving from many clubs, gathering for a few days, then scattering — a goalkeeper of European standard is stabilizing glue. I have watched too many Southeast Asian teams falter purely because the goalkeeping position was not solid. A good goalkeeper does not score, but he gives the whole team a floor to stand on.

If Paes holds the number one shirt, Indonesia has an anchor at the most sensitive position on the pitch.

A contract does not succeed because of the signature, but because of how the name is treated.

I use that line for another aspect of Paes — one I will return to later when discussing public pressure. A naturalized goalkeeper carries a different kind of pressure from a naturalized striker. A striker who scores silences the noise. A goalkeeper who concedes finds the noise arriving first at his origins.

That is the unfairness of the trade, but it is the truth of the trade.

Part Five — The Ole Romeny case: a wider gate, not an easier walk

Ole Romeny is the opposite story.

Romeny is a forward. He faces no change-of-association barrier, because he never represented another federation at senior official level. His path needed only two gates: Indonesian law and FIFA's connection criterion.

In February 2026, Romeny took his citizenship oath. The first gate opened. The second was already open, since the criterion of a grandparent born on former Dutch East Indies territory had been established.

On paper, this is a clean case. In football terms, it raises a different question: Indonesia is building an attack on players raised in the Netherlands, playing in Europe, speaking Dutch at home and Indonesian in the dressing room.

That is not easy.

I once interviewed a naturalized player in another football nation — unnamed, for professional reasons — and he told me the hardest thing was not learning the anthem. It was understanding the laughter in the dressing room. You can memorize an anthem in three days. You need three years to know when a teammate is joking and when he is needling you.

That is the kind of cost no wage bill records.

But Romeny has an advantage: he is a striker, and strikers are forgiven faster. An 89th-minute goal blurs every question about origin. Football remains a sport where goals are hard currency.

Part Six — The rest: Haye, Verdonk, Diks

Paes and Romeny are the most prominent names, but they are not alone. Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk, Kevin Diks — three more names inside the same wave. Three different positions. Three different stories. One legal pathway.

When you look at all five names together, you see something a single name cannot show: these are not three or four scattered transactions. This is a programme.

A programme with designers, executors, and a budget of time and politics.

This is where I want to discuss the Football Association of Indonesia — PSSI. In Paes's case, Indonesian media reported that PSSI pursued the federation transfer persistently over an extended period. "Persistently" here is not a decorative adjective. It describes resources: federation staff time, legal consultancy fees, travel between Jakarta and Europe, conversations with the player's family.

No transfer fee was disclosed, because this is not a transfer. But the real cost exists — it simply sits on a different budget line.

For a Southeast Asian football nation, this is the point I find worth thinking about. We usually measure a federation's strength by its clubs' transfer spending. But there is another kind of strength — administrative capability. The capacity to read law. The capacity to coordinate across state agencies. The capacity for patience.

Indonesia in this period shows high administrative capability.

Part Seven — The origin of the resource: the "blijvers"

To understand why Indonesia can do this, you must go back into history.

In Dutch there is a word: blijvers. Literally, "those who stayed". It refers to Dutch people and Dutch-Eurasian people of European descent who lived in the Dutch East Indies — today's Indonesia — across generations.

The Dutch East Indies was a colony that existed for more than three centuries. Over that span, a community of European descent formed, bore children, built livelihoods, and considered that land home. They were not guests. They were residents.

When Indonesia won independence and decolonization unfolded, most of this community migrated to the Netherlands. But their traces remain: in birth certificates, in civil registers, in documents recording that someone's grandparent was born in Batavia, in Surabaya, in Bandung.

That is the resource Indonesia is now extracting.

And here is the point I consider most important in this entire analysis: this resource is finite. It cannot be renewed.

The Dutch East Indies descendant community is a closed historical population. Those born in Indonesia during colonial times have passed away. Their children — the generation holding the "grandparent born on the territory" criterion — are middle-aged and older. The next generation will no longer meet the grandparent criterion in FIFA's sense, because their grandparents were born in the Netherlands, not Indonesia.

What does this mean?

It means Indonesia is mining a deposit with a fixed reserve. The deposit is rich. But it does not grow back.

Within a decade, this flow will narrow. Not because the law changes, but because people change. Time is a player who cannot be transferred.

In 2026, in an empty stadium, I heard clearly that every match still has its own breath.

I repeat that line here because it is directly relevant. During that period I learned that the most important thing in any system is not what it has, but what it is losing. An empty stadium does not shout that it is empty. It simply goes quiet. And in that quiet, you hear the true rhythm of the match.

Indonesia currently has a full stadium and a depleting reserve. Both things are true at once.

Part Eight — A notable technical detail: why goalkeeper and striker

If you look at the five names, a tactical analyst notices the position distribution immediately.

One goalkeeper. One striker. One midfielder. One full-back. One utility defender.

This is a very rational distribution, and not accidental.

The spine of a team — goalkeeper, centre-back, central midfielder, centre-forward — is where individual quality converts into results fastest. In peripheral positions, individual quality needs coordination to express itself. In the spine, individual quality expresses itself.

A Southeast Asian national team typically struggles in the spine: a defence lacking a commander, a midfield lacking a rhythm-setter, an attack lacking a finisher. These are the three classic holes.

Indonesia has solved two of those three through naturalization, at precisely the two highest-leverage positions.

I do not say this as praise. I say it to point out that this is a calculated choice. The designers of Indonesia's naturalization programme understood that not every position is worth naturalizing. A naturalized full-back has lower marginal value than a naturalized goalkeeper.

That is the thinking of a resource manager, not a trophy collector.

Part Nine — Counter-intuitive angle one: the so-called "legal loophole"

This is where I want to go against most of what I have read in regional media.

The dominant framing of the Paes and Romeny cases revolves around two phrases: "exceptional case" and "legal loophole".

The second phrase irritates me professionally.

In legal language, a "loophole" is a gap the legislator did not anticipate. It is a failure of design. FIFA has long had substantial-connection rules, and within those rules the grandparent-birthplace criterion is a deliberately written clause refined over multiple revisions. This is not a failure of design. This is design.

And there is a further point, more important still.

The condition for being eligible to wear a national shirt has never been indigenous blood. FIFA has never, in any version of its rules, required a player to have "indigenous blood" to represent a federation. FIFA's criteria are about territory, about time, and about the legal link between a person and a country.

So when a report says Paes and Romeny "have no indigenous blood", the report is stating a true biological fact but inadvertently presenting it as if it were a legal problem. It is not.

Eligibility is not indigeneity. This is the distinction I believe most football audiences cannot make, and the media do not help them make it.

I understand why that framing exists. "Loophole" is an attractive word. It suggests something unfair, something exploited. It creates curiosity, and curiosity creates clicks.

But a person with 52 years in this trade should say plainly: curiosity can be created by telling the truth, a little more slowly.

Part Ten — Counter-intuitive angle two: a non-renewable resource

My second counter-intuitive point concerns sustainability.

In most reports, Indonesia's naturalization programme is presented as a strategic advance, a sign that Indonesian football is accelerating, overtaking regional rivals.

In the short term, that is right.

But over a longer horizon, I see a structurally flawed design.

Every strategy resting on a non-renewable resource carries a countdown clock. No one hears the ticking while the mine is full. People only hear it once the mine is empty.

The Dutch East Indies descendant community is such a resource.

Ask the question the way an asset manager would. How many people in the world today have a grandparent born on Indonesian territory before independence? The answer is a finite number, and that number only falls, never rises.

Every time Indonesia calls up another such case, the reserve loses one unit.

This is why I believe that if Indonesia wants to hold its regional standing over the next twenty years, it will have to return to the road Vietnam and Thailand are on: youth development.

Not because naturalization is wrong. Because naturalization is not enough.

Part Eleven — Counter-intuitive angle three: the hidden cost to the youth system

There is a cost I have not seen any report cover fully.

When a national team opens five naturalization slots, five pathways become less contested for domestic players. On the surface that is good, because it raises the bar. But in a football nation whose youth-development funding is already thin, the effect can run the other way.

Young players in Indonesia — and I have spoken with several on regional trips — face a very practical question: if national-team places are partly reserved for men raised in the Netherlands, how much longer is my road? And if the road is longer, should I commit to it?

This is not resentment. This is arithmetic.

And that arithmetic, repeated thousands of times across thousands of young players, can shift the behaviour of an entire generation.

Economists speak of "substitution effects" as a dry concept. In football, substitution effects have faces. They are a 16-year-old in Surabaya reading a squad list, seeing five European names, and wondering whether there is still room.

A football nation can survive without an answer to that question for a few years. It cannot survive without it for twenty.

Part Twelve — Regional context: the ASEAN naturalization race

What makes this story matter to me, a Vietnamese man working abroad, is that it does not stop at Indonesia's border.

The Philippines naturalized long ago. Malaysia has had similar cases in recent years. Thailand has players of foreign descent in its youth teams. And now Indonesia is doing it at a larger scale, more systematically.

When several nations in the same region run in the same direction, what happens is not that each gains a little advantage. What happens is that each one's advantage is diluted.

This is the nature of an arms race. No one wins permanently. Everyone pays.

And what is the price here?

The price is the contraction of investment in domestic development. If you can buy a finished goalkeeper from the Netherlands, how much incentive remains to build a goalkeeping academy?

This is the question I think Southeast Asian federations should answer for themselves, before they answer it through action.

Part Thirteen — The industry transmission chain

If I had to draw the flow of this story, I would draw three layers.

Upstream is the Dutch East Indies descendant community — a closed historical population scattered across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Indonesia itself.

The middle layer is the administrative machinery: PSSI, Indonesia's parliament, and FIFA's rulebook. This is where the upstream resource is converted into playing eligibility.

Downstream are the consequences: a stronger national team, more media attention, more pressure on regional rivals, and a debate about identity.

Within that chain there is an intermediary layer no one has named: the agent ecosystem.

Naturalization does not happen by itself. It requires someone who can find records, read civil registers, contact families, talk to players, knock on federation doors. This is a very specific service — call it the "roots trade".

And if the naturalization model spreads across Southeast Asia, that trade will spread with it.

For a football journalist at 68, this is my favourite kind of detail: new professions born from changes we do not see directly.

Part Fourteen — Public pressure and the price of honour

In every report I read on this subject, I noticed a common thread: the coverage of Indonesia carries a tone that is not wholly celebratory.

There is scrutiny.

There are questions. There are phrases like "exceptional case", "no indigenous blood".

This is something I want to view through social psychology rather than law.

In every community, football is one of the strongest shapers of collective identity. A national team is a mirror in which the public wants to see itself. When that mirror reflects faces different from expectation, the natural reaction is not a legal reaction.

It is an emotional one.

And that reaction has a very concrete consequence for two players: they must carry more than an ordinary player carries.

A player born in Jakarta, playing badly, is criticized professionally. A naturalized player, playing badly, may be criticized for why he is there at all.

This is an invisible drag, and at elite level the invisible drag usually matters more than the visible injury.

I saw this at Euro 2026, when I went to interview Italy fan groups in Milan and Naples.

Euro 2026 showed me that a tactic only becomes complete when the community retells it.

I left the stadium, went into the squares, and listened. The drum tempo of Italian fan groups rose from 90 to 110 beats per minute after the equalizer. Mancini's 3-2-4-1 became a statement of identity, not merely a tactical system. What made that team succeed was not on the pitch. It was a million people reading one match the same way.

Indonesia does not yet have that communal consensus on its naturalization programme. They are on the road to building it, or on the road to losing it. Both possibilities remain open.

Part Fifteen — Risk: four layers

If I had to rank the risks of this programme, I would rank them as follows.

The first layer is reputational risk. This is the biggest risk, not the legal one. The Paes and Romeny cases passed both gates. Clean files. But the way the story is told can turn a lawful case into a contentious one. And contention, once rooted in the public, does not need truth to survive. It only needs repetition.

The second layer is resource-depletion risk. This is structural, slow, and certain. I set it out above.

The third layer is spine dependency. If Paes is injured, or Romeny loses form, the "strength uplift" narrative loses two pillars. And when pillars fall, people lose not only quality but faith in an entire strategy.

The fourth layer is systemic risk. If FIFA changes its interpretation of the grandparent criterion, or if pressure from many federations forces a tightening, Indonesia could lose the model while still building it.

Together these four layers produce an overall assessment of medium. Not red. But not calm either.

Part Sixteen — What this means for Vietnamese football

I was born in Vietnam and work in China, but my job has always given me a vantage point on Southeast Asia. From that vantage point, the Indonesia story is a direct signal sent to Vietnam.

Vietnam has a very specific advantage: a generation of well-schooled players, high collective cohesion, and an academy system that has been running for twenty years.

But Vietnam does not have a large colonial-descendant community in Europe. Vietnam's colonial history is different; its diaspora in Europe is largely descended from post-war migrants, and more importantly, that migration did not produce a significant number of European-level trained footballers.

Which means Vietnam cannot play the same game the same way. Vietnam must win through system quality, through cohesion, through the depth of its development foundation.

That is a slower road. But it is the more durable road, because it does not rest on a deposit with a fixed reserve.

This is the point I want to make very clearly to Vietnamese readers: do not look at Indonesia's naturalization programme as a fear, but as a reminder. A reminder that structural advantage can be broken by one administrative decision, and that the only way to counter it is to build something no one can import.

The beat keeper is not the fastest runner; he runs the full road.

I use that line deliberately here. For twenty years, Vietnamese football has run the full road. Not the fastest. But the full one.

And in a region where many nations are changing roads, running the full road has its own value.

Part Seventeen — Signals to track

For someone in my trade, an analysis does not end with a conclusion. It ends with a list of things to watch.

First signal: further naturalization rounds. If PSSI keeps submitting files to parliament through 2026–2026, the programme is still expanding, not capped.

Second signal: FIFA rule discussions. If any FIFA document touches the grandparent criterion, read it. That is the earliest signal that this model may be limited from above.

Third signal: the Vietnam Football Federation's response. If Vietnamese-descended names appear in squad lists in the coming years, VFF is reconsidering its strategy. If not, that is a choice too — a conscious one.

Fourth signal: team chemistry. This is the hardest to read and the most important. Watch how naturalized players celebrate with teammates. Watch how they answer questions after a defeat. Watch how Indonesian crowds sing when Paes makes a save. Those three small details say more than any statistical table.

Fifth signal: Indonesia's results in the next competitive fixtures. This is the real test of the whole programme. Every theory about "raising strength" must answer to a scoreboard.

Part Eighteen — How to re-read the whole story

If I had to compress everything above into one sentence, it would be this.

Indonesia has found a talent-acquisition channel requiring no transfer fee, resting on two gates both designed in advance — Indonesian citizenship law and FIFA's connection criterion — and that channel gives them a very real short-term advantage at precisely the two highest-leverage positions: goalkeeper and centre-forward.

That is the strength.

But the channel runs on a closed, non-renewable historical population, and it creates a hidden cost to the youth development system that no one has yet measured.

That is the weakness.

What remains is a question about community identity, one the law cannot answer, which is why it will keep being asked for a long time.

Part Nineteen — A few professional notes on coverage

I want to add one thing, as a working journalist, about how this story is being told.

Indonesian media did the hardest part in this case: they asked questions. Calling the Paes and Romeny cases "exceptional" is not an act of disrespect. It is an act of scrutiny.

In a society where football is treated as a common asset, the public wanting to know why a national shirt was given to someone is a legitimate question.

What I object to is the use of "loophole". That word frames the story as inherently improper from the outset, when in fact both files are valid.

To younger people in this trade, I want to say this: when you write about a naturalization case, read the statute before you read the commentary. Check the date of the association change before you speak of loyalty. Get people's names right.

Those three small things will change your writing.

I spent 30 days after Moscow reviewing 40 hours of footage and building a pronunciation table for 32 national teams. The embarrassment of disappointing an audience taught me more than any praise.

Part Twenty — On the things that did not happen

Before closing, I want to touch on something rarely found in analyses: the things that did not happen.

Paes did not stay in the Netherlands waiting for a senior call-up. That was a choice, and what does it mean for a player born in 2026? It means he read his own chances realistically.

Romeny did not decline the invitation. What does that mean for a forward playing in Europe? It means a World Cup place may matter more than a continental championship he would struggle to reach.

And PSSI did not take the easy road. They chose a road requiring years of lobbying rather than a road of simply paying for players.

Those three non-events, added together, tell a clearer story than any results report.

Takeaway

The next internal signal I will be watching is not in Jakarta. It is in Indonesia's next squad list, and in the question of whether one more European name appears.

If it does, the programme is still expanding. If it does not, the programme has begun to hit its ceiling — and that is when the real Southeast Asian race begins, the race on the pitch, where no file helps anyone score.

At 68, I place my trust in the next generation of storytellers.

I will still be sitting here in Chengdu, reading Dutch names out loud, trying to get the pronunciation right. Because every correct name is a piece of truth kept.