Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny and the legal path Indonesia chose

In a conference room in Jakarta there was a long table, a red-and-white flag, and a young man in a white shirt reading an oath in Indonesian, still stumbling over a few final syllables. Ole Romeny. A forward. Born in the Netherlands. From that second, he was an Indonesian citizen.

Six months earlier, in another city, inside another paper system, Maarten Paes received a much shorter decision: FIFA approved the goalkeeper's change of association to play for Indonesia's national team. No flag, no cameras — just a line of text in a database.

I have followed Southeast Asian football from a flat in London for years, in the habit of a man who lives outside the coverage area but refuses to look away from it. The night at Brisbane Road when I was nineteen taught me something I still carry into every piece I write: the night at Brisbane Road did not teach me to accept defeat, it taught me to look again with different eyes. When the Paes–Romeny story reached me, I realised I had to look again, from an angle very few Vietnamese readers want to face directly.

Context: two names, two doors, one strategy

Maarten Paes was born in 2026, a goalkeeper raised in the Netherlands who represented the Dutch U21 side. He was considered one of the more promising young Dutch goalkeepers before moving to FC Dallas in MLS. That youth-international past is precisely what made his file more complicated than Romeny's: Paes could not simply be naturalised, he needed FIFA's permission for a change of association, and that door opened in August 2026.

Ole Romeny took a different route. Unencumbered by another federation at youth level, he only had to complete the domestic legal process: naturalisation in the national interest, approved by Indonesia's House of Representatives, with the oath sworn in February 2026. One goalkeeper. One striker. The two positions with the greatest leverage on a pitch.

According to Indonesia's Kompas, both cases were processed under Article 20 of Indonesia's Citizenship Law No. 12/2026 — a provision allowing discretionary naturalisation in the state interest, subject to parliamentary approval. Both also cleared FIFA's substantial-connection criterion: a biological parent or grandparent born on the territory of the federation a player wishes to represent. Paes's and Romeny's grandparents were born in the Dutch East Indies, on what is now Indonesian soil.

That is the whole legal story. It is clean, it is clear, it has a paper trail. The interesting part is elsewhere.

What is actually being bought here

Let me say plainly something Southeast Asian analysis usually avoids: Indonesia has just completed a deal with no transfer fee at all. No club was paid. No contract was compensated. What PSSI spent was not money — it was administrative, legal and political capital.

According to the Indonesian report itself, PSSI pursued Paes's federation transfer persistently over a long period. That is the diplomatic language of the trade, and translated it means: months of negotiation, repeated work with lawyers, meetings with FIFA, and no small investment in people. A grandparent born in the Dutch East Indies is a necessary condition, but it does not automatically become a place in the squad.

What is being bought is time. A federation that develops its own continental-standard goalkeeper usually needs eight to twelve years, counted from the day a nine-year-old is spotted. Indonesia has compressed that path into a few months of paperwork. In a sport where every World Cup cycle lasts only four years, that is the best bargain available to a Southeast Asian federation.

But this is where I want to step away from the technical analysis and tell a different story.

In 2026, when the pandemic shut the stands, I wrote a master's thesis called Football in Silence. I interviewed thirty-seven supporters of twelve different clubs over Zoom during the period when the Premier League restarted without crowds. Eighty-nine per cent of them said what they missed most was not goals but the feeling of belonging to something larger than themselves. One Arsenal supporter who had not missed a home match in twenty-four years told me something I wrote in my notebook: "I can't remember the score of a single game, but I remember the smell of spilled beer on my back."

The empty summer stadium is where I hear the game's heartbeat most clearly. And that heartbeat pulses where people belong, not where people were born.

So when the Indonesian press calls Paes and Romeny "exceptional cases", implying they have not "a single drop of indigenous blood" — that is the language of civil registry, not of the terraces. I have sat on enough small English terraces to know that nobody beside me has ever asked a player for a birth certificate before singing.

Analysis: why this model should worry Vietnam

Look at the positions. Goalkeeper and centre-forward.

In any national-team building model, these are the two places where a single individual can change results most. A good goalkeeper holds together a back line that has had little time to play together; at international level, where players meet for a few weeks a year, stability in the number-one shirt is worth double what it is at club level. A good striker settles matches with half a chance — and in Southeast Asia, where decisive games often finish with one or two goals, a striker who scores at the right moment is the entire difference between a win and a draw.

Indonesia did not take two wingers. They did not take two midfielders. They took the spine. That is not accidental; it is a conscious strategic choice, even if the original report never says so.

But there is something regional media overlooks: the sustainability of the supply. That supply is the Dutch-Indies diaspora, historically known as the blijvers — the European-descended population that stayed in the Indies long term. They had children and grandchildren on that soil. By the third generation, FIFA's grandparent criterion is satisfied.

That population, however, is finite. It does not grow. No second generation of blijvers is being born in Batavia, because Batavia no longer exists. This is a closed mine, and anyone building a national-team strategy on it must know the reserve depletes with every file pulled.

Set beside Vietnam, the difference becomes clearer. Vietnam takes the slow road: academies, patience, a youth system comparatively well organised in the region. The advantage of that model is renewability. Its disadvantage is speed. Indonesia is deliberately buying speed, and accepting that speed has an expiry date.

There is another notable detail: Indonesia is not alone. The Philippines has done this for years. Malaysia has similar cases. And Vietnam itself has done it — Nguyen Xuan Son, born in Brazil, naturalised as a Vietnamese citizen, became part of the ASEAN Cup story. I mention this not to score a point but to say that the "indigenous blood" debate in Southeast Asia is usually driven more by emotion than by law, and that emotion is very often selective according to results.

The counter-intuitive angle: "loophole" is the wrong word

The Indonesian report uses the phrase legal loophole. That is a technical error, and it matters more than it appears.

The grandparent birthplace criterion is not a defect in the text. It is a rule designed on purpose, sitting in FIFA's regulations governing the application of the FIFA Statutes, and it exists for a very specific reason: football is a sport of migration. Federations worldwide need a mechanism so that their sons and daughters — those born abroad through war, economics or history — can return to play for their country of origin. Without that criterion, international football would belong only to wealthy nations and those with favourable migration flows.

In other words: what the press calls a loophole is in fact a door built in advance. The door may be criticised as too wide, but calling it a hole imputes motive to whoever walks through.

Here I must state a boundary I set for myself when writing. An article standing up for a player does not save the world. An article standing up for Saka does not save the world, but it is a shield. I am not writing to defend Paes or Romeny — they do not need my defence, their files were approved by two independent legal systems. I am writing to defend something else: the right to be judged by what you do on the pitch, not by where your grandparents were born.

There is a genuine tension, and I want to name it plainly. The real cost of the naturalisation model is not money and not law. It is minutes. Every shirt Paes wears is a shirt that does not belong to a goalkeeper developed in an Indonesian academy. Every Romeny goal is an evening when a domestic striker does not play in the biggest match. I have seen the consequence in England, where academies produce young players only to lose them because the first team buys ready-made ones. That price never shows on any balance sheet, and it only becomes visible after about seven years.

That is the true blind spot of this story — not blood, but pathways.

What remains after the applause

In an interview I will never forget, a supporter told me he remembered no matches, only a feeling. The silent stand is the clearest mirror of this sport's love. And a full stand is too, in a different way: it reflects what we choose to love.

Indonesia has chosen. They chose a stronger national team in the short term, and accepted payment in a non-renewable resource. That is a rational decision for a federation that has never reached a World Cup, sitting in the middle of a qualifying cycle and pressed by an increasingly competitive region.

Vietnam will have to choose. And the question is not whether Vietnam should naturalise — reality has already answered that — but which model Vietnam wants: a pump patching the first team, or an additional layer placed on top of an academy system that is not abandoned.

Every missed penalty shoot-out at a major tournament is told as a different story, and that story usually begins with a shaking hand. Every missed penalty is a story untold by a trembling hand. Paes and Romeny, if one day they stand at that spot, will not be asked where they were born. They will be asked one question only, in the language of the terraces: can you score.

That is the whole rule. The rest is paperwork, and paperwork always has careful readers — usually a little later than needed.

From a night at Brisbane Road to an oath ceremony in Jakarta, this game keeps teaching me the same lesson: it always knows how to wait for people, and it never asks where they came from — only whether they stay.