Indonesia's naturalisation of Paes and Romeny: two legal gates and one long-term bet

I watched Indonesia against Saudi Arabia on 5 September 2026 in a small flat in Liverpool, with the clock close to 2am. On 79 minutes my laptop screen lit up with hundreds of notifications at once: Maarten Paes had saved Salem Al-Dawsari's penalty to preserve a 1-1 draw for Indonesia. But what kept me up for another two hours was not the dive. It was how the Indonesian press wrote about him immediately after the final whistle.

"Naturalised goalkeeper". "A man with not a drop of indigenous blood".

I do not believe in rumours; I believe in sources that have walked with me for twenty years. Here, the source is legal text, not a feeling. The phone rings at 2am and I know the market has just moved — but this time what moved was not a transfer, but how a Southeast Asian nation defines its own national team.

Context: a wave that did not start yesterday

Indonesia did not open this play overnight. Under PSSI president Erick Thohir, the list of foreign-born players has grown steadily: Shayne Pattynama, Jordi Amat, Sandy Walsh, Rafael Struick, Ivar Jenner, then a higher-quality group in Jay Idzes, Calvin Verdonk, Thom Haye, Mees Hilgers and Eliano Reijnders. The two names the Indonesian press has cited most in the recent cycle are Maarten Paes and Ole Romeny.

The common thread is easy to spot: born and raised in the Netherlands, carrying the bloodlines of families tied to the Dutch East Indies. In the cases of Paes and Romeny, that thread is far thinner than for most of their team-mates. They are descendants of Europeans who settled in the colony — the group Dutch historians call "blijvers", those who stayed.

In other words, the test is not skin colour or indigenous blood. It is the birthplace of a grandparent.

Hearing crying through a screen, I understand that football does not fit inside a football. Behind every naturalisation case sits a family that migrated across generations, a name misspelled somewhere in a register, a mother in Rotterdam or Utrecht deciding what her son's future should be. For a transfer reporter this is the hardest kind of story: no transfer fee to quote, no release clause, only paperwork and history.

Two legal gates, not one loophole

It is worth separating what most headlines merge into one.

The first gate is Indonesian citizenship law. Law No. 12 of 2026, Article 20, allows the president to grant citizenship to a foreign national in the national interest, following an opinion from the DPR, Indonesia's House of Representatives. It is a process with a resolution, an oath and documents. Ole Romeny completed this step in February 2026.

The second gate is FIFA's rulebook. The Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes (RGAS) allow a player to represent a national team where a biological parent or grandparent was born on the territory of that federation. The grandparents of Paes and Romeny were born in the Dutch East Indies — today's Indonesia. The "substantial connection" condition is satisfied by a single line of civil registry.

The third gate applies only to Paes, and it is the most complicated part. He represented the Netherlands at under-21 level, so beyond citizenship he also needed FIFA's approval of a change of association. That application was approved in August 2026. As I read the regulations, this sits close to the edge of the association-switch mechanism — the kind of detail a reporter must check three times, because a single wrong character in a legal file can cost trust you will not easily recover.

One wrong letter, remembered for life.

And the most important point: none of these three gates requires indigenous blood. Indonesian law does not. FIFA does not. So when the press calls this an "exceptional case" and a "legal loophole", it is describing a designed mechanism as if it were an accident. The gap between "eligible" and "indigenous" is the crux most articles skip over.

The cost is not on the fee sheet

In my trade, every deal is measured in money. Naturalisation carries no transfer fee. That leads many people to conclude it is free. It is not.

The cost is administrative and political capital. A naturalisation file in the national interest has to pass through parliament, face public questioning, and accept that every added name is a moment PSSI puts its credibility on the line. The Indonesian press described PSSI as pursuing Paes's file persistently over a long period. Persistence, in the language of negotiators, means time, relationships and money poured in that never appear on a balance sheet.

But there is a larger cost, and it is structural. The supply source for this model is a historical population that has already closed. The Dutch and Eurasian people who once lived in the East Indies are not producing new descendants in Indonesia. Every player naturalised today draws down a finite, non-renewable reserve.

That is the fundamental difference between naturalisation and youth development. An academy can produce the next generation. A historical reserve cannot.

Three blind spots the official story does not mention

First, Indonesia's biggest risk is reputational rather than legal. Both Paes and Romeny cleared two independent legal systems. But the phrase "not a drop of indigenous blood" travels much further than a citation of Article 20 of Law 12/2026. If a major match goes badly, two stories — on-pitch failure and identity dispute — will fuse together, and the policy, not the player, will be the one interrogated.

Second, single-point dependency. Paes is the number one goalkeeper, Romeny the centre-forward. These are the two highest-leverage positions on the pitch: a good goalkeeper stabilises an inexperienced back line, a good striker decides matches in a single moment. Precisely for that reason, if either is absent, the claim that the team's "strength has been significantly raised" will expose its thin edges. I have watched enough national teams to know that a back four assembled over ten days never develops the understanding of one that trains all season. A goalkeeper who can command the line in front of him is worth double in that environment.

Third, the opportunity cost for domestic players. Every naturalised slot is a slot no longer available to a player raised in a domestic academy. From a management angle this is rational: buying a finished product is faster and cheaper than waiting ten years. From an ecosystem angle, it is a deferred investment. And deferred investments in football tend to return at exactly the wrong moment.

I hold a clear professional view here: young players developed early and pushed into adult rhythms usually pay with injuries. But when an entire generation of domestic players loses its route to the national team, the cost is harder to see: nobody gets injured, nobody improves.

Where Vietnam stands on this board

This is the part I care about most as someone reporting for a Vietnamese audience.

Let me be blunt: Vietnam is not outside this game. Filip Nguyen, a goalkeeper born in the Czech Republic, has naturalised and played for the national team. Jason Pendant Quang Vinh has completed the process. Đặng Văn Lâm carries Vietnamese blood through his father, grew up in Russia, and has been part of the squad for years. So this is not a story about Indonesia doing something Vietnam cannot do.

The difference is scale of supply. Dutch colonial history left Indonesia with a Eurasian and Indo-Dutch community large enough to sustain a pipeline of high-quality players for years. Vietnam's history is different. The overseas Vietnamese community is large and young, but mostly born after 2026, and the proportion that reaches professional football in Europe is far smaller. Vietnam's source is real but thinner, and that forces a different game: organisation, systematic youth development, collective cohesion — which I have always believed is the more durable advantage.

Southeast Asia is racing. The Philippines took the naturalisation route very early, at far greater volume than Indonesia. Malaysia has called up many mixed-heritage players this cycle. Thailand goes its own way, slower and quieter. When everyone does the same thing, anyone's advantage thins out.

None of us controls our colonial history. But everyone controls one thing: the quality of the youth system built over the next ten years.

What I think happens next

There are three signals I will track.

First, Indonesia's new naturalisation files. If PSSI completes more diaspora cases over the next twelve months, it will be building squad depth rather than patching two spine positions. That would suggest the model is maturing rather than chasing short-term results. Alongside that, they need to distribute minutes to domestically developed players. If appearances concentrate in the naturalised group, every long-term benefit claim becomes hollow.

Second, FIFA's appetite for changing the rules. If the naturalisation wave spreads across ASEAN, pressure to tighten the grandparent birthplace criterion may appear. Every time FIFA reopens RGAS, completed files stay safe, but files in preparation slow down.

Third, Vietnam's response. I want to see the next squad list, and whether it includes overseas-born Vietnamese players. If it does, I will read that as the VFF wanting two lanes open. If it does not, the academy remains the main road.

What remains

A season without crowds still never lacks heartbeats. In 2026, when the Premier League paused for the pandemic, I set up a Facebook group for Liverpool supporters in Vietnam that reached 23,000 members, and in one livestream I explained why the club needed to extend a centre-back's contract rather than spend big in the market. Thousands of comments that day taught me one thing: fans understand very quickly, provided you give them enough facts and enough respect.

The Paes and Romeny story will be remembered in two ways. One is a story about a goalkeeper who saved a penalty in Jeddah and a striker who scored on his debut in the red and white. The other is a story about civil registries reopened after decades, about people who left Java, Sumatra or Sulawesi never knowing their grandchildren would wear the national shirt.

Every contract is a life waiting to be written onward. Naturalisation is the same, with one difference: there is no seller, no buyer, only a question no algorithm can answer — who does a national team belong to, and what does it belong to.