Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny and Indonesia's Passport Move That Is Changing Southeast Asia's Rhythm

On the night of 8 February 2026, I was sitting in a small flat in Manchester. Outside the window, English rain fell in long streaks, the kind that makes no noise but soaks through slowly. On the laptop screen was the video of Ole Romeny taking the oath to become an Indonesian citizen. Grainy, tinny, exactly the sort of short clip I open while waiting for the morning training-ground bulletin.

I paused on the final frame and sat still for a while.

Not because the scene was particularly moving. But because I recognised something very familiar: a football nation trying to buy back time.

Across 1,500 empty nights, I learned to hear a match through my veins. You hear the things that never make the match report: the scrape of studs on the Carrington turf at six in the morning, the sigh in a press room when a name is mispronounced, and the silence of a federation at the exact moment it decides to take the road nobody wants to say out loud.

The Romeny video belongs to that last category.

Context: when a passport becomes a position on the pitch

In August 2026, FIFA approved the change of association for Maarten Paes, a goalkeeper born in 2026 who had represented the Netherlands at Under-21 level. In February 2026, Ole Romeny, a forward not yet 25 who plays his club football in Europe, completed the oath ceremony to become an Indonesian citizen. Two names, two moments, one story.

I do not follow the Indonesia national team daily. But I do follow how Southeast Asian federations build teams, because that is the market Vietnamese fans care about, and because it is where I grew up, in those afternoons in front of a screen watching my country play qualifiers.

Maarten Paes is not an unknown quantity to anyone following North American football. He starts in goal for FC Dallas in MLS, came through the Dutch development system, and was capped by the Netherlands at Under-21 level. Purely as a footballer, he is the profile of a keeper with a European coaching foundation: good at reading crosses, competent with the ball at his feet, and above all experienced at a high level at an age when many Southeast Asian goalkeepers are still sitting on the bench in a domestic league.

Ole Romeny is different. He is an attacking player, the type who runs into space behind a defensive line, finishes with both feet, and tends to drift wide rather than pin himself to one zone. For a national team that has spent years searching for a centre-forward, he is the piece any Southeast Asian coach would covet.

But the story is not about football. It is about paperwork.

To understand why these two names generated so much coverage in Indonesia, you have to look at the two doors they had to walk through. The first door is Indonesian citizenship law, specifically Law No. 12 of 2026, whose Article 20 permits naturalisation on grounds of state interest and requires approval from the legislature, the House of Representatives. That is an administrative route, not an automatic one. To pass through it, you need a sponsor at state level, a file, and time.

The second door is FIFA's regulation on changing associations, set out in the regulations governing the application of the FIFA Statutes. The core test is what specialists call a substantial connection: a player may represent a federation if a biological parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory. Not nationality, not indigenous blood, but the birthplace of an ancestor.

Both Paes and Romeny passed through both doors. They have ancestors born in the Dutch East Indies, the territory that is now Indonesia. That is why their files stand up under both national law and football law.

And here is where I want to pause longer, because this tends to be glossed over. These people have their own name in history: the blijvers, the settlers of European descent who stayed in the Dutch East Indies long term, married, had children, and left behind a network of descendants scattered across the Netherlands today. They hold Dutch passports, speak Dutch, grew up in the Dutch football system, but in the birth records of their grandparents there is a place name that belongs to Indonesia.

For FIFA, that is enough.

For part of Indonesian public opinion, it is not.

Two positions, one logic: reinforcing where it hurts most

If you set aside the noise and look at the squad sheet, the most striking thing about these two cases is not the number. It is the position.

Goalkeeper and centre-forward are the two roles where a single individual can change a result the most. A good goalkeeper does not merely make saves; he changes how the whole back line stands, how high or deep the team pushes, and the confidence of the men in front of him. A good centre-forward turns stalemates into three points, and in qualifying, three points are everything.

Based on my experience tracking matches in this region, Southeast Asian federations usually naturalise in lower-leverage positions: wide midfielders, full-backs, sometimes a central midfielder. Those players make a team prettier, but they do not shift the picture. Indonesia this time struck at the vertical axis, at the spine of the team.

That is a deliberate choice, not luck.

It also explains why Indonesian media call Paes and Romeny the two most prominent stars of the naturalisation wave. Not because they are the most famous in Europe, but because they occupy the positions where fans feel the difference most immediately. A naturalised full-back takes a few games to register. A naturalised goalkeeper registers from the very first action.

I have an occupational habit: whenever a federation signs a big deal, I do not read the price. I read the position. The position tells me what they are afraid of. If you naturalise a goalkeeper, you are afraid of silly goals conceded in the 85th minute. If you naturalise a centre-forward, you are afraid of 0-0 draws against weaker teams. Indonesia feared both, and addressed both.

No transfer fee, but a different invoice

This is where I want to speak plainly to anyone treating naturalisation as a free gift.

The rhythm of a transfer is not in the signature; it is in the silence between two offers. With Paes and Romeny, that silence lasted far longer than in an ordinary deal. No transfer fee was paid to a club, true. But there is another kind of cost: administrative cost, legal cost, and above all political capital.

According to reporting in the Indonesian press, the country's football federation pursued Paes's change-of-association file persistently over an extended period. That is not the work of a single meeting. It is the work of many months, perhaps years, with lawyers, with birth records, with grandparents' documents, with an approval process at parliamentary level.

And the final price is not measured in money. It is measured in political credibility. Every successful naturalisation leaves an invisible debt to public opinion: the belief that the right thing was done, that the money and effort went to a legitimate purpose.

Anyone who keeps the rhythm understands that the transfer market has a heart too, and it beats with the seasons. In Europe, its season is July and January. In Southeast Asia, its season is the qualifying campaign and the regional tournaments. Indonesia is sowing in the right season.

A gold mine with an expiry date

There is one detail in this whole story that I consider more important than how many saves Paes makes or how many goals Romeny scores.

This supply is finite.

The Dutch East Indies descendant group is a closed historical population. It emerged from a specific period that ended in the mid-twentieth century. Every year that passes, the number of people who still qualify under the grandparent-birthplace test shrinks rather than grows. And the number of those who are also of an age to play elite football is smaller still.

This raises a strategic question that the Indonesian press, in its enthusiasm over two new names, has not seriously asked: after Paes, after Romeny, after Thom Haye, after Calvin Verdonk, after Kevin Diks, who is next?

Not nobody. But certainly fewer.

To me, this is the fundamental difference between naturalisation and development. Development is a flowing stream. Naturalisation is a withdrawal from a savings account. You can withdraw fast, withdraw a lot, and see results within two years. But you cannot withdraw forever.

There is a second consequence I have seen in many places around the world, not only Southeast Asia: when a national-team position is taken by a newcomer, young domestic players in that same position lose their target. Not their chance immediately, but their mental picture of the future. A young player can accept waiting two years behind an established senior. He struggles to accept waiting two years behind someone who was naturalised at 27.

That is a cost nobody writes into the minutes. It is paid for with morning training sessions that no longer have anyone turning up.

ASEAN is running the same play, at different tempos

What is worth noting is that Indonesia is not alone.

The Philippines have walked this road for a long time, drawing on their diaspora in the United States. Malaysia has taken similar steps, on a smaller scale. Seen more broadly, Southeast Asia is converging on a common formula: federations search for descendants in Europe and North America, persuade them to play for their ancestors' homeland, and compensate for the shortcomings of domestic development systems.

Indonesia does this with an advantage no country in the region can fully replicate. That advantage is colonial legacy. Through the Netherlands, Indonesia has a large descendant community, closely tied to European football, and most importantly with Dutch football development behind it. If you look for Indonesian descendants in the Netherlands, the probability of finding someone who grew up in a professional football environment is much higher than finding Vietnamese descendants in France, because the scale of the community and its attachment to football differ.

This is something I think Vietnamese people need to look at squarely. Not to worry, but to understand the nature of the game. Indonesia is not doing anything unfair. They are exploiting a historical resource that history left them. We do not have that same resource at the same scale.

But we have something else. And that something only has value if we know how to use it.

The contrarian angle: "legal loophole" is the wrong phrase

This is the part where I want to argue with the very articles I read.

Many Indonesian outlets, including reputable ones, describe the Paes and Romeny cases as "exceptional" and hint at a "legal loophole". The word loophole is used a great deal. Technically, it is wrong.

A loophole is a gap the law did not anticipate, and through which people slip. The grandparent-birthplace criterion is not a gap. It is a designed test, written deliberately, maintained through multiple revisions of FIFA's regulations. It exists because world football has millions of migrants, and federations need a way to determine who belongs to them. The birthplace of a grandparent is one such way.

Put differently: eligibility does not equal indigenous blood. That is the dispositive legal point, and it is routinely ignored in social-media argument.

I understand why people want to call it a loophole. Called that way, the story becomes easier to tell. There is a rule-bender, there are the deceived, there is a system that needs fixing. But football does not work like that. A player born in Utrecht, whose grandmother was born in Medan, who speaks Dutch, who plays in the Netherlands, has under current rules the right to choose Indonesia. There is nothing murky about him choosing.

The 1,500 stories from empty-stadium nights are a ticket, not to get into the ground, but to get into the hearts of supporters. And that ticket is not issued by bloodline. It is issued by decision. A naturalised player truly belongs to a national team only when the stands decide to accept him. No law can force that, and equally no law can prevent it.

The real risk lies elsewhere

If the legal risk on these two files is low, where does the real risk sit?

First, in dependence on a handful of individuals. When you rebuild a team's spine with two people, you place the entire "we are stronger" narrative on two people. One injury to Paes, one dip for Romeny, and the argument that naturalisation has raised the team's level will be dissected. Not because it is false, but because it will no longer have living evidence.

Second, in the burden of honour placed on those two players themselves. They must not merely play well. They must play well enough to defend a policy. That is a weight very few footballers choose for themselves.

Third, and I think most importantly, in the imbalance between two pathways. When a federation can buy back time with a passport, the incentive to invest in academies falls. Not to zero, but it falls. Every pound spent on a naturalisation file is a pound not spent on an Under-15 cohort. In the short term nobody notices. In ten years, everybody does.

Fourth, in the regional arms race. If the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia all run down the same lane, each country's edge flattens out. When everyone has European descendants, what decides matters is no longer the passport, but the ability to weld together a group drawn from different football cultures. That is a coaching problem, not a legal one.

Where Vietnam stands in this picture

I do not want to end with a warning, because warnings are easy and analysis is hard.

What I see clearly is that Vietnam occupies a position that is different in kind. We have fewer diaspora resources, the Vietnamese community in Europe is less connected to professional football, and our domestic development system, after many years, has produced a generation of players with a clear identity. That is an asset that cannot be imported.

But assets only have value when they yield. And the advantage of a cohesive team, one that understands each other, one that has played together since youth level, only yields when it is sustained by a continuous development cycle, uninterrupted by repeated changes of coach and philosophy.

Put another way: Indonesia buys time. Vietnam has to manufacture time. Two different roads, and both can lead to the same place. Except one is faster and finite, the other slower and more durable.

I still remember the feeling in 2026, standing in Volgograd and mispronouncing an England player's name three times in a single half. I shut myself in a hotel room for a day, then spent the following month rewatching footage and relearning how to say every name. The lesson I took was not to be more careful. The lesson was: things built in a hurry have to be built again.

The World Cup is only one beat, but whoever holds that beat will hear the whole epic of football. Indonesia is trying to hold the beat with contracts. Vietnam will have to hold it with seasons.

What to watch

Over the next twelve months, there are four signals I will be tracking.

First, Indonesia's squad list for the next international window. If Paes is the number one and Romeny starts, the naturalisation story shifts from the argument phase to the verification phase.

Second, the Indonesian public reaction after the first match in which these two feature. A win will silence criticism very quickly. A defeat will amplify it many times over.

Third, the next moves by federations elsewhere in the region. If another ASEAN federation announces a new descendant file, we will know the model is spreading.

Fourth, and perhaps most important to me, statements about academies. If Indonesia's youth-development budget does not fall over the next two years, the substitution-effect hypothesis weakens. If it falls, then this stops being a story about two footballers and becomes a story about a generation left behind.

The most expensive thing in football is the moment a fan realises the team needs him. No passport can buy that moment. Paes and Romeny will have to earn it themselves, one action at a time, in front of a stand that is not remotely easy to please.