Maarten Paes and Ole Romeny: Indonesia's Naturalized Spine and the Lesson for Vietnamese Football

One Night in Kuala Lumpur, Looking Toward Gelora

There is a moment I still keep in my professional memory. Sitting in a small apartment in Kuala Lumpur, watching a replay of an Indonesia match at Gelora Bung Karno, I saw the stadium burn red and tens of thousands of flags rise like ocean waves. In the goal stood a fair-haired, blue-eyed goalkeeper, unnervingly still amid the fury of both sets of fans. He did not shout, did not show off, only clapped his gloves and looked toward the touchline as if searching for a familiar face. His name is Maarten Paes, born in 2026, a Dutch goalkeeper. That night he wore the red and white of Indonesia.

At the other end, another striker looked equally unfamiliar to Southeast Asian eyes — Ole Romeny, a name most Vietnamese fans had never heard before 2026.

I sat for a long time after the match ended, not to count points or chances. I sat to ask myself a question I had never had to ask across more than fifty years of watching football: where does a national team begin — from blood, from a passport, or from memory?

The night at Camp Nou taught me that miracles need no passport. But Southeast Asian football in 2026 is teaching me the opposite lesson: sometimes a passport is the miracle.

Why This Story Matters to Vietnamese Fans

Based on my experience following regional matches, I have always kept one rule: when a direct rival changes how it builds its team, you must understand the mechanism before judging the outcome. Indonesia did not change its coach, did not change its formation. It changed its spine through administrative channels.

This is the story of two specific people. Maarten Paes — a goalkeeper born in 2026, capped by the Netherlands U21, who had to undergo a federation transfer approved by FIFA in August 2026. Ole Romeny — a forward who took the Indonesian citizenship oath in February 2026. Around them is a group of other Dutch-descended players, some already on the same path: Haye, Verdonk, Diks.

For Vietnamese fans, this is not a story about a distant team. It is the geopolitical map of Southeast Asian football being redrawn stroke by stroke, and Vietnam sits inside that map.

Two Doors, One Journey

For someone like Paes or Romeny to wear the red and white, they had to pass through two independent doors, both of which have now closed behind them with a quiet click.

The first door is Indonesian law. Citizenship Law No. 12 of 2026, specifically Article 20, allows naturalization through a "state interest" route, and this route must be voted through by Indonesia's House of Representatives — the DPR. This is not an ordinary administrative procedure. It is a political decision, with full political consequences.

The second door is FIFA's regulatory system, specifically the Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes, known in English as RGAS. It contains the "substantial connection" clause: a player may represent a federation if a biological parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory. Paes and Romeny each cleared the grandparent-born-in-the-Dutch-East-Indies criterion.

What most Indonesian newspapers emphasize — from what I have read, for instance in Kompas — is the fact that neither player has indigenous Indonesian blood. True. But what deserves more attention lies elsewhere: neither door, technically speaking, requires indigenous blood. They require only a grandparent's birthplace, or the political approval of the state.

This is the crux. Eligibility is not indigeneity. They are two different concepts, and the latter appears in no FIFA legal document.

The Spine — Where Money Cannot Buy

If I were a scout for any federation, the two positions I would always watch most closely in the market are goalkeeper and centre-forward. Not because they are the prettiest or most famous, but because they carry the largest single-player leverage on results. A good goalkeeper can keep an average team alive through an entire qualifying campaign. A good striker can turn a single chance into three points.

Indonesia has just reinforced exactly those two slots.

This is the level of benefit I call "spine leverage". You can naturalize an excellent wide midfielder, and your team gains polish. But naturalize a goalkeeper and a centre-forward at their peak, and your team can change its position in the standings. Paes at 27 is a goalkeeper entering his prime, and for a goalkeeper, 27 is only the beginning — their best years often stretch into their early thirties, sometimes longer.

I have seen what happens in a region when a team adds to its spine correctly. It forces an entire group of rivals to recalculate their routes. Not because rivals get weaker, but because the general standard is raised. The table cannot measure this immediately, but neighbouring coaches feel it before the ball rolls.

What is worth noting is that the claim "the team's strength has been raised" appears often in the press, but comes with no specific data — no FIFA ranking before and after, no comparative qualifier results, no defensive metrics. It is a claim that is true as a feeling but unproven as a number. As a working analyst, I always distinguish between two categories: claims and evidence. Here, we have a claim.

A Free Gift and an Invisible Price

In the language of the transfer market, a player like Paes or Romeny would normally be worth several million euros, sometimes more, depending on form and remaining contract. But Indonesia is not paying that. No transfer fee was disclosed, because this is not a transaction between two clubs. It is a transaction between a state and an individual.

From a team's perspective, this is nearly a free gift: a goalkeeper trained in the European system, a striker who has played in top European leagues, joining without a transfer fee.

But nothing is truly free in football. The price here is administrative, legal and political. According to information I have been able to access, PSSI pursued Paes's case persistently over a long period, and this requires non-trivial resources: negotiating with citizenship authorities, lobbying the House of Representatives, working with FIFA on the federation transfer. A federation much smaller than many others in the region could not afford this kind of cost.

So while the transaction on paper is free, the transaction in reality is expensive in another currency — political capital. And that currency, once exhausted, cannot be borrowed from anywhere.

Colonial Blood and a Well With a Bottom

This is the part I want Vietnamese fans to read one beat slower.

Indonesia has an advantage Vietnam cannot fully replicate, and that advantage does not lie in football. It lies in history. Indonesia was once the Dutch East Indies, a colony that spent centuries under Dutch rule. Across those hundreds of years, a class of Dutch and European settlers lived there long-term, known as the "blijvers", those who stayed. Their descendants today are in Europe, but their administrative traces — birth certificates, ancestors' birthplaces — remain on Indonesian territory.

Vietnam has a different colonial history, with a different power, and a football diaspora in Europe not as large as the Dutch community. There are Vietnamese diaspora in France, but their professional football traces at Europe's top level are thin compared with the descendants of the Dutch. This is a historical fact, not a complaint.

And this is also the temperature I want to stress: colonial blood is a well with a bottom. It is not a continuous stream. It is the population of a nation that disappeared from Southeast Asia politically more than seventy years ago. Each player brought back drains the well a little. Indonesia may have accounted for this, but if not, then strategically, this is a decision with an expiry date.

The value of a player is not on paper, but in the nights he stays awake for the stands. Yet paper is the path to those nights.

How Indonesians See Each Other

Following Indonesian media during this period, I sense a public opinion split in two. One half looks at results and says: bring them in. The other half looks at identity and asks: then who is Indonesian?

This is a serious interrogation, and it has grounds. When two players are called the team's "most prominent stars", and their prominence comes with a question about blood, they carry not only the responsibility of playing well. They carry the responsibility of proving the cleanliness of a policy. If they play well, the policy is praised. If they play poorly, the policy is condemned. That is a burden no coach can teach you to carry.

In Vietnam, we tend to view naturalization with a slightly different eye — a little reserved, a little indifferent. But when a direct rival in the region brings in two names seasoned by European football, indifference stops being a wise choice.

What the Word "Loophole" Forgot

This is the part where I want to go against prevailing opinion.

Part of the Indonesian press, and part of regional opinion, calls the cases of Paes and Romeny an exploitation of a "legal loophole". I believe that statement, technically speaking, is an exaggeration.

The grandparent-born-on-territory criterion is not a crack someone left accidentally. It is a designed rule. It was written because football understood that populations move, borders are redrawn, families dissolve and recombine. A nation cannot keep a team separate from its own history. That clause is how football acknowledges history, not how football is exploited.

What does this mean for Vietnamese fans? It means the current frustration is aimed at the wrong target. The frustration should be aimed at a larger question: should a nation spend resources finding players in Europe instead of raising players at home? That is a real question. Whether Paes is eligible is a question already answered.

And I want to admit something, because an honest analyst must say even what discomforts him. Part of the pull of the Paes and Romeny story does not lie in football. It lies in the feeling that a nation is talking to itself about its own identity through the feet of two men born ten thousand kilometres away. That is a beautiful story, and it is also a painful one.

On the other side, I must also say one dry sentence for balance. Every naturalized player takes a slot from a domestically developed player. Both players discussed in this piece are pillars, not substitutes. That means at least two Indonesian players raised in domestic academies lose the chance to appear in a major match. No one writes about that price. But it exists, and it will be paid over the next five to ten years.

A Race No One Wants to Name

One thing I consider a real threat to Southeast Asian football, not only to Vietnam, is the scenario I tentatively call the regional naturalization race.

The Philippines has done this for years with players of half European-American ancestry. Malaysia has had its own cases. Indonesia is now moving faster and more methodically. When three or four federations pursue the same model, the competitive value of that model falls for everyone. This is the basic logic of any arms race: upgrading yourself upgrades the whole playing field, and the only winner is the one who stays out of the game.

There is another possibility, smaller in probability but larger in consequence. If the regional naturalization wave grows, FIFA may face pressure to review the grandparent-born-on-territory criterion. At that point, Indonesia's advantage disappears in a boardroom meeting. I say this not to speculate, but to remind that any strategy built on law can be replaced by another law.

The pitch never grows old; only we fade with the seasons. But laws do grow old with every assembly.

Freeze Frame

I return to my original question, the one I carried through that evening in Kuala Lumpur.

Where does a national team begin? The answer depends on who is asking. For Indonesians living in the excitement of a World Cup qualifying push, the team begins with results. For a fair-haired Dutchman standing in the Gelora goal, the team begins with a lineage he has never met. For me, sitting here and watching Southeast Asian football through two nationalities, the team begins with something simpler: with a nation deciding who belongs to it.

That is a decision Vietnam will soon face, sooner or later, and I do not believe in easy answers. What I believe is that football always rewards the builder and always punishes the borrower — it is only that the punishment never arrives within the same generation.

A nation does not need medals; it needs the ball to roll in the right direction. But sometimes, the question of the right direction is harder to answer than the question of how to score.