Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny and Indonesia's Naturalisation Machine: Colonial Bloodline as a Strategic Asset

In February 2026, in a hall in Jakarta, Ole Romeny placed his hand on the holy book and recited the oath of Indonesian citizenship. Cameras captured the moment a forward born in the Netherlands formally became a citizen of a country more than eleven thousand kilometres from his birthplace. Months earlier, Maarten Paes had no such ceremony. His file passed through a different door, where FIFA approved his change of association in August 2026, closing a long stretch during which the Indonesian football federation pursued the procedure with persistence and considerable cost.

Southeast Asian fans saw two new names on a team sheet. I saw a machine assembled long before, running on a fuel the region had never factored into its strategic arithmetic: the birth certificates of grandparents.

Kompas, one of Indonesia's major newspapers, framed both cases in telling language: exceptional cases, legal loopholes, no indigenous blood. That framing says much about the psychology of the football culture receiving these players. It also shows Indonesian media casting itself as auditor: do these two players really belong to us?

Context: when a national team learns to behave like a buying club

Southeast Asia has settled into three reasonably clear tiers. The top tier holds Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand. The middle tier is the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. The bottom tier is Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. The lines between them are drawn by three things: squad depth, domestic league quality, and the ability to export players abroad.

Indonesia has just found a fourth route, outside those three. It is the exploitation of colonial heritage.

The Dutch East Indies existed for centuries, and over that time a stratum emerged that historians call the blijvers: settlers of European origin who stayed in the colony long term, married, and had children on that soil. Their descendants carried wholly European bloodlines, but their grandparents' birth certificates recorded a place inside what is now Indonesian territory. When Indonesia won independence, most of them emigrated to the Netherlands, carrying both their genes and their memories.

Seventy-five years later, their descendants are players developed in Dutch youth systems, playing in European leagues, speaking Dutch at home and English in the dressing room. The only thing they lacked to wear Indonesia's shirt was a passport. And the only thing the federation had to do was read one line in their file correctly.

Set beside this, Vietnam has a structural disadvantage, and it does not come from management competence. The French also left a colonial legacy, but the Vietnamese diaspora in France has largely not entered elite professional football at a comparable scale. That is a difference of migration history and of the host country's football structure, not a difference of ambition.

The model Indonesia is running resembles a buying club more than a developing federation. It raises the national team's ceiling in the short term, in exchange for a long-term pipeline dependent on a finite reserve. To understand why this machine runs so smoothly, one has to walk through each gate every file must open.

The first gate: Citizenship Law No. 12/2026

The cases of Romeny and Paes did not travel the ordinary naturalisation route based on residency. They travelled through Article 20 of Indonesia's Citizenship Law No. 12/2026, a provision permitting naturalisation in the national interest. This mechanism has one important property: it is not an administrative procedure but a political one. The file must be approved by Indonesia's House of Representatives.

In other words, each naturalised player is a collective decision of a legislature, and therefore a decision that must be argued in public. The federation cannot quietly sign papers. It must stand before the chamber and explain why a man born in Utrecht should wear red and white. That both files cleared this gate speaks to the federation's political mobilisation capacity, not merely its technical competence.

The second gate: FIFA's substantial-connection criterion

Alongside national law, each file must also pass FIFA's gate. The Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes, commonly shortened to RGAS, permit a player to represent a federation where a biological parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory. The criterion mentions no ethnicity, no language, no residency period. It asks one question only: where were your grandparents born.

For Romeny, the journey stopped there. For Paes, one step remained. He had represented the Netherlands at Under-21 level, meaning he had bound himself to another federation at youth level, so switching shirts required a change of association. FIFA approved that request in August 2026. The notable detail is that Paes played youth internationals at 22, an age sitting at the very edge of the change-of-association rules. That is the kind of detail file handlers read over and over before submitting.

Three sources are not numbers; they are three worlds that must meet. Here, those worlds are the federation's administrative file, FIFA's regulatory text, and Indonesian public opinion. The first two mesh quite neatly. The third is another matter.

The decisive point: playing position is not accidental

The two highest-leverage positions in football are goalkeeper and centre-forward, and both players brought in this cycle occupy exactly those slots. A national team can mask weakness in wide areas, rotate its midfield, compensate for a slow centre-back by dropping the block. Nobody masks a first-choice goalkeeper or a first-choice striker. These are the two places where one mistake costs a match.

Paes, born in 2026, is entering the most settled phase of a goalkeeper's career, and goalkeepers typically sustain peak form later than outfield players. Romeny is the attacking spearhead. For a national team whose back line changes personnel frequently and rarely trains together, a Europe-based goalkeeper delivers a stabilising effect larger than any midfield signing. I do not trust speculation; I trust the chain of actions that leaves footprints. Here the chain is recorded by position: the federation did not naturalise at random, it naturalised along the spine.

Look at the same cohort, including Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk and Kevin Diks, and the picture sharpens: this is a campaign with a map, not a set of scattered deals. The map is filling in squares on a tactical board with players developed in Europe.

The real cost of a zero-fee deal

From a transfer market perspective, these are free deals. No money flows from the federation to a European club. But calling them free misreads their nature.

The real cost sits in four items absent from any balance sheet. First, legal cost, as a file passes through two distinct legal systems. Second, lobbying cost, as each case must be approved by legislators. Third, political capital, as the federation stakes its credibility every time it submits a new file. Fourth, reputational cost, as domestic media repeatedly reopens the question of whether the naturalised player belongs.

That the federation pursued Paes's file persistently across multiple milestones indicates the second and third items are substantial. In my trade, we call this a conditional fee, entirely distinct from a transfer fee. In that cashless summer, some contracts were written in honour. And honour, unlike money, can only be borrowed, never printed.

A finite pipeline

This is the part the Kompas piece does not address, and the part that matters most to anyone tracking the region.

The supply source of this model is the blijver community, a historical population that has already closed. The number of people with a grandparent born in the Dutch East Indies is finite, and it only declines. Each successfully exploited file reduces the remaining reserve. Comparing it to resource extraction is harsh, but structurally accurate: this is a mine, not a river.

That means Indonesia's naturalisation strategy will peak within a few years and will then be forced back to domestic development. The question is not whether this happens, but whether Indonesia prepares for it. The best evidence of preparation is not the number of new files, but the quality of domestic academies.

The substitution effect on youth development

Every national-team place given to a naturalised player is a place not given to a nineteen-year-old developed at a domestic academy. In the short term, nobody sees it. No statistic measures a lost opportunity. Over a decade, it becomes a compressed generation.

I have followed scouting networks in developing football nations for years, and I see a repeating pattern: those systems find genuine talents and also generate football lottery tickets and broken families weighed down by expectation. Naturalisation by descent creates a new variant of that problem, gentler morally but no less consequential: the domestic teenager loses his place to a player brought in on his grandfather's birth certificate.

That is not an argument against naturalisation. It is an argument that a federation must state clearly what its model is, and must pay the price of that choice transparently.

The counter-intuitive angle: the loophole is not where people look

Calling this a legal loophole, as Indonesian media does, is technically wrong. The grandparent-birthplace criterion is a rule designed on purpose, long present in FIFA's rulebook and applied across more than two hundred member associations. Had FIFA wanted to close it, it would have done so decades ago. The boundary between eligibility and indigeneity is a boundary drawn by law, and both Paes and Romeny stand firmly on the eligible side of it.

The real loophole lies elsewhere, and it appears in no legal text. It is treating a finite reserve as if it were an infinite flow. A strategy built on the assumption that there will always be another Europe-based player of Indies descent to call home is a strategy that has not planned for day thirty. The day the mine runs dry, and the team must stand on its own feet.

Indonesia's biggest risk here does not come from FIFA. It comes from the stands. A qualifying defeat will be attributed to the naturalisation policy before it is attributed to tactics, form or scheduling. Paes and Romeny carry a reputational load far heavier than their purely professional role. One error by either will be read as a verdict on an entire policy.

For an Indonesian fan in Bandung or Surabaya, the story is not Article 20 or RGAS. It is a twelve-year-old practising in front of his house, looking up at the screen and seeing his place handed to a man who learned the national anthem three months ago. That feeling needs no data to exist, and it does not vanish when the team wins. A good federation must manage that feeling, not just manage files.

What to watch next

Based on my years of watching matches in the region, this machine will run for at least two more cycles before it hits the ceiling. Future files will be quieter, since precedent is set and process has become habit. What matters now is not who gets naturalised next, but whether the federation uses the time the reserve buys it to rebuild its academy system.

For Vietnamese football, this is a direct competitive signal that cannot be ignored. Vietnam's federation faces a choice with no easy answer: accelerate down the naturalisation path with a far smaller overseas pool, or persist with development and squad cohesion, slower but more durable. The answer lies not in copying Indonesia, but in understanding precisely why the model works, and when it will stop working.

Pieces only fit together when we are willing to look at them from four sides. From the federation's side, this is an administrative victory. From FIFA's side, it is a valid file. From the players' side, it is a career opportunity opened late. From the domestic stands, it remains an unanswered question. Those four sides have not yet met, and until they do, any rushed conclusion about Indonesia's naturalisation machine is only half the truth.