Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny and a Contract Not Signed in Ink: Indonesia Is Rewriting Southeast Asia's Family Tree

The Chengdu heat in August was so heavy that the air conditioner in my apartment had to run at full power, and I sat in front of the screen replaying a video less than two minutes long. A young man, nearly six foot two, in a white shirt, standing in front of a red backdrop. He raised his right hand and read something in Indonesian that I guessed he did not fully understand. His hand rested on a small book. Around him, men in suits nodded and applauded.

Those hands belonged to a goalkeeper. I remember thinking that — not about procedure, not about law, but about the hands. The hands of a man who catches balls, hands that had once pushed a penalty out of the goal, resting on a book he had probably never read.

His name is Maarten Paes. Born in 2026 in the Netherlands, goalkeeper for FC Dallas. And since 8 August 2026, after FIFA approved his change-of-association request, Paes has officially become an Indonesian national-team player.

Six months later, on a morning in February 2026, in Jakarta, another young man sat in exactly the same chair. Ole Romeny — a forward, also Dutch, also young, also reading the oath in halting Indonesian. He signed. He became Indonesian.

Two men. Two positions. One goalkeeper and one centre-forward.

In football, no two positions hold a team's fate more tightly than those two. The keeper saves a loss; the striker scores a win. Everything in between — the midfield, the full-backs, the tireless runners — only matters if those two ends of the spine hold firm. Indonesia understood this. And they acted.

And I, a Vietnamese woman living in China, writing about football for Vietnamese readers, look at those two names and think of a bigger question. Southeast Asia is learning to read family trees, and have we — the Vietnamese — prepared ourselves for that game?

A country that chose another path

To understand why two Dutch names now wear Indonesia's red and white, we must step back. Not into football history — into colonial history.

Indonesia was once the Dutch East Indies, a Dutch colony that lasted more than three centuries, from the early 17th century until the Japanese occupation in 2026 and the declaration of independence in 2026. Throughout that time, hundreds of thousands of Dutch people lived, worked and married in the archipelago. Some of them did not return to Europe when the colony collapsed. They stayed. Their descendants carry European blood but have grandparents or parents born on Indonesian soil.

Those people, in Dutch, are called blijvers — those who stayed.

Seventy-five years later, when football became a global industry and a passport became an asset, that blijver community suddenly became a gold mine. Not a gold mine of money, but of blood, of the birth certificates of great-grandparents.

Indonesia's Citizenship Law No. 12 of 2026, Article 20, and its subsequent amendments, allow the state to naturalise foreigners in the national interest — on the condition that parliament, the DPR, approves. This is a highly flexible provision, designed for footballers, artists, scientists — anyone the country deems necessary.

At the sporting-law layer, FIFA has its own code. The Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes, known as RGAS, allow a player to represent another federation if a parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory. This is not a loophole. It is a deliberately drafted criterion, known as the substantial-connection rule.

Put the two laws together and Indonesia has a very clear path: find young players born in Europe with grandparents born in the former Dutch East Indies, invite them to naturalise under Law 12/2026, then switch federations under FIFA rules. Both doors are open, and neither requires indigenous blood.

This is the point the press sometimes misreads. When Indonesian and regional media call this an "exceptional case" or a "legal loophole", they are conflating two different concepts. Being eligible does not mean being indigenous. That is the dispositive legal point, and both players passed it lawfully.

Reading the debate around Paes and Romeny, I remember the day I was rejected for being a girl. In 2026, in Chengdu, I filed a tactical analysis and received a rejection note. I did not argue. I rewrote it differently. And I learned one thing: the ball never reads paperwork. It does not read passports, ID cards, or your great-grandfather's birth certificate. It only rolls toward the person who runs faster, judges better, and finishes more accurately.

That is the naked truth, and it is a truth every federation in the world knows.

Why goalkeeper and centre-forward?

If the Indonesian Football Association, PSSI, wanted to naturalise players merely for attention, it could have chosen a winger, a full-back, anyone with a name. Instead it chose the two most leveraged positions.

Start with the goalkeeper. In football, no position lets one man influence results more than the keeper. A weak team can still win if its keeper is excellent. A strong team can still lose if its keeper errs. This sounds obvious, but it carries a tactical consequence rarely discussed. In national-team football, where the back line is far less familiar than at club level — centre-backs arrive from different clubs, meeting just days before a match — a reliable keeper can compensate for that looseness.

Maarten Paes was born in 2026. By August 2026, when FIFA approved him, he was 26 — the peak of a goalkeeper's curve. Goalkeeper is the position with the longest career span; a keeper at 30 or 33 can still be a pillar, perhaps even more mature than at 26. Which means Indonesia does not have a keeper for one cycle. It has one for two, perhaps three.

Moreover, Paes has represented Dutch youth teams, including the U21s. That says not only that he sits among the best of Dutch football — a nation always in the top ten — but also signals something: if a young player reaches the Dutch U21 level, he has beaten thousands of peers to get there. He is not clearance merchandise.

Then Ole Romeny, at the other end. Indonesian media describe him as one of the most prominent stars, and that is why PSSI pursued him. A forward — the position that directly decides goals, which decides points, which decides World Cup qualification.

This is the point I want to stress: most Southeast Asian federations naturalise players in average positions — midfielders, defenders — because those are easier to find. Indonesia naturalised exactly the two positions with the greatest leverage. That is not coincidence. That is strategy.

But I must also concede this. Until there is concrete match data — appearances, goals conceded, goals scored, technical indices — the claim that Indonesia has grown stronger remains a narrative claim, not a data claim. Indonesian media say naturalisation has raised the team's strength to a new level, but no article provides a number. No FIFA ranking points before and after. No comparative qualifier results. No expected goals, no tackles per 90, no clean-sheet rate.

Strength is asserted, not measured. And in football, an assertion without measurement is usually a belief — not a fact.

Two legal doors

I want to spend time clarifying the two legal doors, because this is where many articles go wrong.

The first door is Indonesian citizenship law. Law No. 12 of 2026, Article 20, allows naturalisation in the national interest, subject to parliamentary approval. This is a political-legal process, not a football one. Paes and Romeny both passed through it: one approved in April 2026, then cleared by FIFA in August 2026; the other sworn in February 2026.

The second door is harder: FIFA's regulations. It concerns a concept called change of association. A player may switch federations only once, and only if specific criteria are met. For Paes, the story was more complex: he had played for Dutch youth teams, including the U21s, so his switch was not a simple paper exercise. It required FIFA review and approval. And FIFA approved, in August 2026.

I read that PSSI pursued Paes's case persistently over an extended period. That is an important detail. It shows this was not an improvised naturalisation; it was a sporting-diplomacy campaign, with lobbying costs, legal costs, relationship costs.

And here I must be clear: this is not a story of evading the law. It is a story of using the law. Both players are eligible because they satisfy a criterion FIFA deliberately designed — a grandparent born on the territory. This door opens to anyone with the right lineage, even if they have not a drop of indigenous Indonesian blood.

If you want to call that a loophole, you must call the entire global player-transfer system a loophole. Because the nature of sporting law is to create paths — and those paths will be walked.

Still, I am not naive enough to ignore what that phrasing implies. When the press calls this an "exceptional case" or a "legal loophole", it is not merely describing events. It is posing a political question: do these people really belong to us? It is the question football, in every country, must face when it shifts from a pure game to a national symbol.

The Southeast Asian race

Now I look from the perspective of a Vietnamese person.

For two decades, Southeast Asian football has had a relatively stable order. Thailand is the region's traditional power. Vietnam, with its golden generation of 2026-2026 — the 2026 AFC U23 Championship, the 2026 AFF Cup — rose to become its number-one counterweight. Indonesia always had potential but was chronically unstable, with painful qualifier defeats and disappointing AFF Cups.

The arrival of the naturalisation wave changes that equation.

Not only Paes and Romeny. From what I understand, a group of other Dutch-rooted players have been naturalised or are in the process — names like Haye, Verdonk, Diks. That means Indonesia is not merely plugging two gaps. It is trying to restructure its squad around a cohort with European backgrounds.

This raises a serious question for Vietnam. And I do not think there is an easy answer.

Vietnam's resources for naturalisation differ from Indonesia's. Vietnam was a French colony, and the Vietnamese community in France is not large enough to produce a dense enough stream of professional footballers for naturalisation. Overseas Vietnamese in the US, Australia, Canada, Germany, Czechia have children who play football, but the number and quality of those trained to a high professional level in Europe is limited. More importantly, for an overseas Vietnamese to be naturalised under Vietnamese law usually requires a parent, or a long residence period, far harder than FIFA's grandparent-born-on-territory criterion.

In other words, history gave Indonesia a gold mine that Vietnam does not have. That is a structural disadvantage, not a technical one. And it cannot be fixed by training better in a few sessions.

I once sat in Rostov, Russia, on 27 June 2026, when Germany lost 0-2 to South Korea and were eliminated in the group stage. The press area held fifty journalists, only three of them women, one of them me. I did not write about Mats Hummels's defensive error. I stood between two groups of fans. One sang Arirang through tears of joy; the other sat silent, face in hands. I recorded their messages to each other, then wove them into a bilingual piece titled Two Cries on One Pitch.

Arirang still echoed on the stand, and I realised each nation has its own way of crying when its team loses. And each nation has its own way of believing in its team.

In Indonesia, that belief is now placed in a group of players from another country. I am not saying that is wrong. I am only saying it has a price, and the price is not money.

The blind spots

Here I want to be a little contrarian. Three things most articles about this naturalisation miss.

First, the gold mine is finite. The blijvers — descendants of Dutch settlers who stayed in the Indies — are a countable historical community. Every time a player is naturalised, the reserve shrinks a little. There is no way to expand it, because no one can give birth to more great-grandparents. This means Indonesia's naturalisation strategy, if it succeeds, will erode itself.

It is a "use-by-date advantage". Unlike youth development, where you can build a centre, improve coaching, and produce a new crop every year, history-based naturalisation can only run once. Once the eligible pool is exhausted, Indonesia must return to an old question: how do we produce good players at home?

Second, the invisible cost of importing. When you bring a Europe-based player into the national team, he occupies a slot a domestic player fought years for. That creates two effects. One, domestic players lose opportunity, motivation, sometimes their development path. Two, some players feel the national team is no longer theirs — but belongs to a favoured group. These feelings do not show on the scoreboard. But they show in the dressing room.

Third — and I think most important — the biggest risk in this strategy is not legal, but reputational. Both players are lawful. But how the press calls them — "exceptional case", "no indigenous blood", "legal loophole" — is not neutral language. It is language that questions belonging.

And when a player is publicly asked whether he belongs to this country, that question follows him throughout his career. Every time he errs, people will say: see, the foreigner. Every time he shines, some will say: he only came for the money.

This is a trap, and it is not Indonesia's alone. Every naturalising football nation faces it — France, Germany, Japan, Qatar. Only, for nations with long naturalisation traditions, people are used to it. For Southeast Asia, this is the first time, at this scale.

What does Vietnam see?

Finally, I want to talk about what I think Vietnam should and should not take from this story.

What Vietnam should not do is panic. Indonesia naturalised two players, but Indonesia has not beaten Vietnam in a major match purely because of those two. Panic leads to bad decisions — chasing naturalisation at any cost, ignoring principles, inviting unsuitable players just to manage appearances.

What Vietnam should do is look at itself. Vietnam has had one of Southeast Asia's best youth-development systems for two decades. The golden generation of 2026-2026 mostly came from those academies. That is an achievement no one can deny, and it has a property naturalisation lacks: sustainability.

A player trained from 10 to 20 at a Vietnamese academy can serve the national team for ten years, and will also produce the next generation as a coach. A player naturalised at 26 may play for five or six years, then return to where he was born.

I am not saying youth development is better than naturalisation in pure sporting terms. I am saying it has a different shelf life. And in a long race, everyone knows what is more durable.

But — and this is my "but" — Vietnam cannot forever rely only on youth development while ignoring competitive reality. If by 2026 or 2027 Indonesia has a European goalkeeper starting and a European striker scoring, and Vietnam still has only well-trained domestic players, the result may not be what we want. Football does not reward justice. It rewards whoever scores more.

The real question is: can Vietnam sustain its youth-development edge while keeping the door open for overseas Vietnamese who want to return? Is there a third path — not importing, not sealing off, but expanding the definition of "Vietnamese" in football?

I do not have the answer. But I know it is the question the Vietnam Football Federation and Vietnamese football people must face, not in ten years, but within two or three.

Freezing the memory

I still think about those hands. Maarten Paes's hands resting on the red-and-white flag at a ceremony in Jakarta. The hands of a keeper who will save a team he probably never imagined, two years ago, he would belong to.

I do not know if he can sing the Indonesian anthem. I do not know if he feels Indonesian. Those are questions only he can answer, and perhaps even he is not sure.

But I know one thing: the contract is not signed in ink, but in the memory of an entire stadium. And in Indonesia, that memory is being rewritten.

In Vietnam, we too have a stadium, a stand full of memory, and an unanswered question. Every anonymous match inside me is a poem waiting to be sung. And the poem about Vietnamese football over the next ten years — who will write it?