Maarten Paes and Ole Romeny: Indonesia Is Not Buying Players, Indonesia Is Buying Time

In 2026, with the stadiums empty, I wrote for the seats and the echoes. That afternoon in Suita, during the 1–1 draw between Gamba Osaka and Vissel Kobe, I counted 23 times a player turned his head toward the empty stands in the first half — three times the rate of a match with fans — and average time on the ball rose by 1.8 seconds. Since then I have kept one professional belief: what never shows up on the scoreboard can still be measured, provided someone is willing to sit still long enough to count.

April 2026: Maarten Paes acquires Indonesian citizenship. August 2026: FIFA approves his change of association. February 2026: Ole Romeny takes his oath. Those three dates contain no goal and no save. But in my notebook they are the heaviest events Southeast Asian football has produced in two years — because both names occupy the two most expensive positions on the pitch: a goalkeeper and a centre-forward.

The story comes out of Indonesia, via a Kompas analysis, and it is told in the register of a background check rather than a sports report. The two brightest stars of the Indonesia national team, the paper says, carry no indigenous blood. The phrases used are "exceptional case" and "legal loophole."

Technically, their path runs through two independent gates. The first is Indonesia's Citizenship Law No. 12/2026, Article 20, which permits naturalization on state-interest grounds with parliamentary approval. The second sits in the FIFA Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes (RGAS): a player is eligible for a federation if a biological parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory.

Paes carries the subtler legal detail: he had already played for the Netherlands U21, so switching to Indonesia required a one-time change of association, which FIFA approved. Romeny went the oath route. The same cohort includes Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk and Kevin Diks.

Set beside Vietnam and Thailand, this is no longer the story of one federation. The Philippines and Malaysia are walking the same road. Southeast Asia is entering a recruitment race whose prize is a World Cup place and whose stake is the very definition of a national team.

The first thing I want to pull out of the story: there is no transfer fee here. In club accounting terms, this is a free acquisition. PSSI paid no club a single sum to have Paes and Romeny.

Free, however, does not mean costless. The real cost of this deal sits in administration, law and reputation — and it is paid in time. The report notes that PSSI pursued Paes's federation transfer persistently, over a long stretch. That is a cost that appears in no club's financial statements and sits outside the reach of any financial fair play rule.

The second point is positional choice. A national team gets little training time, and the back line is where familiarity takes longest to build. A settled goalkeeper therefore carries more amplification than almost any other position: he does not need to understand his teammates, his teammates need to understand him. In regional tournaments, clear chances per match are few, so a centre-forward who can finish is worth more than a winger who can dribble.

Paes and Romeny fill precisely the two deepest hollows in Indonesia's structure, which is why their effect is larger than an addition of two names.

The third point, the one I think is under-told: this recruitment source is finite.

The grandparent-born-on-territory condition is tied to one specific historical event: the Dutch East Indies. Every great club was once born in a blog nobody read — this time it was born in a municipal registry book in a Dutch town. The Dutch and Indo-European settlers who stayed long-term in the colony, whom scholars call blijvers, left behind a diaspora of descendants whose ancestors were born there but who carry entirely European blood. That is a closed population. It does not reproduce itself into eligibility. Every year, the generation of grandparents who are still alive and still documented thins out.

The heritage window is closing with each birth year, and no federation can reopen it with money.

Against Vietnam the picture sharpens. Vietnam has a French colonial legacy, but a far smaller diaspora tied to a developed European football ecosystem. In other words, Vietnam has less raw material for this model. That is a structural constraint, not a strategic choice.

Which explains why the two paths are diverging. Indonesia raises its ceiling in the short term by importing finished quality. Vietnam is forced to compete through development and cohesion — slower, less glamorous, more durable.

There is a hidden cost I always write down: from what I have observed across transfer windows and national-team call-ups, the naturalization model does not take money from the domestic game, it takes minutes. Every starting shirt handed to a naturalized player is a shirt taken from a domestically developed one. For Indonesia, that expenditure is acceptable across two or three cycles. After that, it is not.

Paes was born in 2026 and is in the mature phase of a goalkeeper's arc, a position that typically holds its level longer than others. Romeny is described as ascending. Neither has published performance data in the report, so I keep that judgment cautious.

"Legal loophole" is the part of the story I disagree with most, and the reason is simple: a rule does not become a loophole merely because it produces an outcome someone dislikes.

The grandparent birthplace criterion is a deliberately designed provision inside FIFA's application regulations. It exists to handle exactly this category: people with a blood and legal link to a country who do not share its ethnic profile. Eligibility and indigenous blood are two different things, and the football rulebook has never merged them.

But the larger mistake lies elsewhere, and it is not Kompas's. It is the assumption that naturalization equals immediate strength.

The report asserts that the naturalization movement has significantly raised Indonesia's strength. No FIFA ranking points, no qualifying results, no comparative sample is offered to quantify that lift. Strength here is asserted, not measured.

For someone who works by writing things down, that gap matters. It means Indonesia is running a model whose costs are paid up front while the returns sit in the future — and that future depends on things beyond PSSI's control: the fixture calendar, injuries, and whether a goalkeeper or a centre-forward is actually in form.

The biggest risk I see is not legal. It is reputational, and it is asymmetric. If a future naturalization file runs into a documentation dispute, the damage will far exceed the combined benefit of these two successful cases.

And there is one more variable: dependence on a handful of individuals. If Paes or Romeny misses a decisive match, the strength-upgrade narrative will be dissected in ways nobody wants.

I will track four signals over the next twelve months: the next squad list, the minutes given to domestically developed players, the Vietnamese federation's response, and any move by FIFA on the grandparent criterion. If Indonesia keeps using the heritage pipeline to plug defence and attack without matching investment in academies, it is borrowing a debt that comes due exactly when this generation turns thirty.

A goalkeeper does not need glory; he needs a goalmouth and a heart that keeps the rhythm. But every goalmouth eventually needs someone standing in front of it — and that is work no passport can do on your behalf.