Indonesia, Paes and Romeny: The Passport Race Rewriting the ASEAN Football Map

On FIFA's change-of-association list, Maarten Paes's name carries an August 2026 date. I was sitting in my flat in Valencia, reopening an old notebook — the one I have carried since the days I stood at the edge of Levante UD's training pitches. At the Levante academy I learned to watch a boy play for three hours just to refine the rhythm of his first touch. I also learned another habit: writing names down. I write every youth player's name into a notebook; ten years later, those names become the map of a generation. On one page from the 2026-19 season there is a line about a group of young goalkeepers born in the late 1990s across Dutch academies. One of those names is Paes, born 2026, a former Netherlands U21 international.

Half a year after that August 2026 marker, another line crossed my screen: Ole Romeny, a forward, took the Indonesian citizenship oath in February 2026. Two names, two positions, one story. And that story does not live on a pitch. It lives in paperwork.

A three-tier order being reshuffled

To place these two names properly, the regional order has to be rebuilt. Southeast Asian football runs on three fairly clear tiers. The top tier holds Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand. The middle tier holds the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. The bottom tier is Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. That order has been stable for more than a decade, and it is largely decided by the quality of domestic youth development and the stability of the national league.

Indonesia sits in the top tier but has never truly pulled clear of Vietnam and Thailand. They have the largest population in the region and one of the most fanatical audiences in Asia, yet their runs at major tournaments usually break at the knockout stage. That is why a new strategy has surfaced over the past few years: finding players in Europe with a historical tie to the archipelago.

That tie is not mythology. During the Dutch East Indies period, a portion of Dutch and European settlers remained in the colony long term, known by the term blijvers — those who stayed. Their descendants carry entirely European blood, but have grandparents born on former colonial territory. That is precisely the opening FIFA's rules create: a player may represent a federation if a parent or biological grandparent was born on that federation's territory. The criterion sits inside the regulations governing the application of the FIFA Statutes, usually summarised as the "substantial connection" requirement. The grandparent birthplace condition is a door designed on purpose, not a bug discovered by accident.

Alongside it, Indonesia's Citizenship Law No. 12 of 2026 allows naturalisation on state-interest grounds, under Article 20, with approval from the House of Representatives, the DPR.

Put the two systems together and you get a two-gate procedure. For Paes, the second gate was more delicate: he had played for the Netherlands at U21 level, so a change of association was required, and FIFA approved it in August 2026. For Romeny, the final gate was the oath in February 2026. Beyond these two names, the list also includes Haye, Verdonk and Diks.

The detail nobody mentions: positions

The list deserves a closer look at a point the press usually skips — position. Paes is a goalkeeper, Romeny a centre-forward. These are the two positions with the greatest single-player leverage in any squad. Football is a sport where most individuals' influence is diluted by structure, but the goalkeeper and the striker are the two hard exceptions.

A goalkeeper brings stability to a back line that, at national-team level, barely knows itself. At club level, four defenders train together daily, weekly, monthly. They know who steps up, who drops, who covers when the ball changes direction. At national-team level, that shared time collapses into a few days per window. A goalkeeper who reads situations and commands his area fills much of that gap through voice and positioning alone.

The striker decides whether good play turns into goals. A team with 60 per cent possession and twelve shots but no one finishing on the right beat ends the night with one point or none. I have watched enough La Liga matches to know that the difference between ninth place and fourth is often one player inside the box, not a shape on a board.

The notable point is not that Indonesia naturalised two players. It is that they picked the two highest-leverage slots in a squad — goalkeeper and centre-forward — and bought stability in both at zero transfer cost.

Look at the cost structure. No transfer fee was disclosed. From a club-market angle, that is a free signing. But the real price sits elsewhere: administrative cost, legal cost and political capital. The Indonesian football federation, PSSI, is reported to have pursued Paes's federation transfer persistently over an extended period. Persistent is not a decorative word here. It means paperwork, dialogue with state bodies, time, and reputation placed on the table.

In thirteen years observing the industry, I have not seen many Southeast Asian federations run a department strong enough to walk through two legal systems at once: a country's citizenship law and FIFA's regulations. The DPR approving these cases shows a level of coordination between sport and politics that most federations in the region simply do not have.

This supply will run out

There is a structural feature that almost never makes the short bulletins. Indonesia's talent source is non-renewable. The blijvers group is a closed historical population. The descendants of colonial-era settlers form a finite set, and every time a player is called into the national team, that set shrinks by one.

This does not mean the strategy is wrong. It means the strategy has a shelf life. Over the next three to five years, the pipeline still holds names. After that, the curve turns downward. At that point, if the domestic academy system has not been invested in parallel, Indonesia will face a gap that naturalisation policy cannot fill.

I have seen the shape of this problem at a smaller scale. Provincial clubs in Spain often live off one generation maturing at the same time, then slide when that generation moves on. The failure of a provincial club does not make the big papers; it is carved into the barriers of its home ground. That cycle repeats often enough to become a rule, and it applies to much larger projects too.

A replicable template

Indonesia's template has four steps, and all four are copyable: identify diaspora players with a grandparent born on national territory, complete citizenship through the state-interest route, clear FIFA's substantial-connection gate, then deploy them.

It is an exportable template. The Philippines and Malaysia have taken similar paths at smaller scale. What stands out is that Indonesia is doing it at the largest scale in the region, with state resources behind it.

Inside the agent ecosystem, a new profession is forming: the roots finder. Their work is tracing civil records, colonial-era birth certificates, parish registers and immigration files — the kind of documents no football archive keeps. It is a service line that transfer bulletins have not yet named, but it exists and it pays.

The comparison with Vietnam

Place the two models side by side and two roads appear. Indonesia follows the model of a buying club: importing finished goods, raising the ceiling fast. Vietnam follows the development model: teaching from the ground up, slower but more durable.

The diaspora resource gap is real. Vietnam's colonial history is French, and its overseas community has a far thinner professional football tradition than the Indo-Dutch community. In other words, Vietnam does not have the same mine to dig.

But one thing should be said clearly: that is a difference in resources, not an inherent weakness. A squad of players who grew up together, speaking the same football language since academy level, holds a cohesion advantage that an assembled squad does not. That advantage never makes headlines, but it shows up in the 85th minute of an away match.

The counter-intuitive angle

The prevailing media label — "exceptional case", "legal loophole" — deserves a second read. The grandparent birthplace criterion sits inside FIFA's regulations as a designed condition. It exists to handle migration, displacement and shifting borders. Calling it a loophole is an interpretation, not a legal event.

The decisive point lies in the relationship between two concepts: eligibility and indigenous blood. They are different things. FIFA's rules do not require indigenous lineage. Indonesia's citizenship law does not either. Both Paes and Romeny passed two independent gates. Their legal files are clean.

The real risk lies elsewhere, and it is reputational. The "loophole" and "no indigenous blood" framing can harden a domestic constituency even when everything is fully compliant. When a naturalised player misses a decisive penalty, the story stops being about the penalty. A shootout is the summary verdict of a match; the past saves no one from the spot. And for a naturalised player, that verdict can be stretched into a verdict on an entire policy.

There is one more counter-intuitive point on Vietnam's side. If Indonesia succeeds, pressure on Vietnam's federation will rise in the direction of hunting for Vietnamese-heritage players. I would argue that reaction needs very slow consideration. A federation chasing a copycat template without a matching diaspora mine will spend administrative resources to acquire players equal to or weaker than its domestic ones. The gain may be smaller than the loss.

Finally, there is a systemic risk rarely mentioned. If many federations pile into one template, the value of the advantage decays for everyone. This is the kind of competition where the last winner is usually the one who left the game first.

Signals to track

Three next markers belong on the board. First, further naturalisation announcements from PSSI and further DPR approvals. Each case that clears says something about the speed of the pipeline, and indirectly about whether the domestic academy system is being invested in.

Second, any move from FIFA toward reviewing the grandparent criterion. So far there is no such signal, but a naturalisation wave spreading across federations could build political pressure to tighten it. When the rule changes, the advantage under construction stops mid-road.

Third, hardest to measure and most important: integration quality. A naturalised goalkeeper and striker only have value if the rest of the squad accepts them in the dressing room. That variable sits in no dataset, and it is the variable federations consistently undervalue.

For me, the Paes and Romeny story will not be settled on grass. It will be settled in internal briefings, in press conferences, and in training sessions with no cameras. When a federation gains an advantage through administrative channels, it must sustain it through the same channels. Everyone sees the ball roll. The real work happens before it rolls.