Indonesia and the Naturalization Dressing Room: How Paes and Romeny Are Redrawing the ASEAN Map

On a trip following the Vietnam national team to Jakarta last March, I stood in the press area of Gelora Bung Karno Stadium and witnessed something strange: Indonesian journalists were not asking about tactics. They were asking about passports. About grandparents. About bloodlines. A local colleague pulled my arm, pointed at the team sheet and whispered: "That's Maarten Paes, born in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Ole Romeny was born in Nijmegen too. Our two most important players have not a single drop of Indonesian blood." That night I stayed back to write in my journal, and realised I had just touched a story far bigger than a single match.

I decided to spend the next three weeks re-reading PSSI's naturalization files, comparing them with how Vietnam and Thailand build their squads, and asking myself: if this is Indonesia's move, how will the ASEAN dressing room change?

Context: two legal gates, one story of identity

Maarten Paes, born in 2026, is a goalkeeper on the books of FC Dallas after coming through the FC Utrecht academy. Ole Romeny is a forward who has played for NEC Nijmegen and FC Emmen. Both were born in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and neither has Indonesian ancestry in the conventional biological sense. Yet both are eligible to wear the jersey of the archipelagic national team, and PSSI has completed the paperwork for both.

Paes's case is the more complicated. He once played for the Netherlands U21 side, meaning he had to go through a federation transfer - a mechanism FIFA permits only once in a career. PSSI pursued the file persistently over a long period, and in August 2026 FIFA formally approved it. Romeny's path was shorter: he swore the Indonesian citizenship oath in February 2026, after Indonesia's House of Representatives (DPR) approved the proposal under Citizenship Law No. 12/2026, Article 20.

The crux that Indonesian media is now excavating: neither legal gate requires indigenous blood. Indonesian law allows naturalization on grounds of national interest. FIFA, in its Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes (RGAS), only requires that a player have a parent or grandparent born on the federation's territory - the so-called substantial connection. Paes's and Romeny's grandparents were born in the Dutch East Indies, so the files are valid.

This is not tactics. This is personnel, and it is reshaping the regional game.

Analysis: the two most important positions, one finite lineage

What struck me most was not the legal story but the positions. Paes is a goalkeeper. Romeny is a centre-forward. These are the two roles with the single greatest leverage on the pitch. If Indonesia wanted to naturalize, they picked precisely the two keystones of the team's spine: the man who saves and the man who scores.

I once followed a lower-tier V.League side in the 2026 season when they naturalized a Brazilian centre-back. He played well, but the team was still relegated because the attack could not score. The lesson: naturalizing players on the periphery of the squad almost never creates structural change. But naturalizing a goalkeeper - the man who commands the entire back line, who shapes the psychology of every ball - creates a domino effect. And a centre-forward turns chances into points.

At national-team level, where players meet for only a few days, positional familiarity is inherently low. A European-class goalkeeper like Paes can become a stable constant for a patched-together defence. At the same time, Romeny solves a problem Indonesia has wrestled with for years: who scores when the attacking moves break down.

But here is where the story gets interesting. Indonesia's naturalization wave is not infinite. It rests on a historical population that can run dry.

The blijvers - descendants of Dutch settlers who stayed on in the colonial Indies - produce a pool of players with European passports, European training, but grandparents born on Indonesian territory. That pool is finite. With PSSI having tapped Paes, Romeny, then Haye, Verdonk and Diks, they are drawing from a historical well that cannot be refilled.

Vietnam has no equivalent source at that scale. Our French colonial history is different, and the community of overseas Vietnamese playing professionally in Europe is far thinner. Thailand is the same. The Philippines and Malaysia have tried similar models with more limited returns.

This raises a strategic question for Vietnamese football: if Indonesia can buy ready-made quality without a transfer fee, what do we play with? The most sensible answer is cohesion and development - two slower but more durable assets.

Contrarian angle: the so-called loophole is not a loophole

Indonesian media, including Kompas, is framing this story as an exceptional case and a legal loophole. I think that framing is both right and wrong. Right, in that it reflects a public feeling that something is off when the two brightest stars of the national team carry no indigenous blood. Wrong, in that the rule Paes and Romeny cleared is not a system failure - it is a deliberately designed mechanism.

The grandparent-born-on-territory clause is a FIFA criterion created on purpose to handle colonial and migration legacies, not an oversight. In purely legal terms, eligible and indigenous are two completely different concepts. The media conflating them is manufacturing a crisis that does not exist on paper.

But there is a subtler point that worries me. That is Paes's case. He once played for the Netherlands U21 at the age of 22 - an age right at the edge of the federation-transfer rules. FIFA has approved it, but this is exactly the grey zone any future dispute would target. If another Indonesian naturalized player runs into a similar paperwork issue, the whole model could be called into question.

And here, the biggest risk is not on the pitch but in public opinion. If Indonesia loses a key qualifier with Paes in goal and Romeny up front, the identity story will fuse with the performance story, and both will be put on trial at once. The pressure on PSSI will mount faster than any victory they can accumulate.

From an ASEAN football geopolitics standpoint, this is a precedent worth tracking. Vietnam, Thailand and others may face pressure to weigh a development model (slow but deep) against a naturalization model (fast but short-term and bounded by historical resources). For Indonesia, this is a strong move, but the historical well is running dry. For Vietnam, it may be a wake-up call to accelerate youth development rather than wait to be left behind.

What to watch

The next qualifying window will be the real test. I will be watching three signals: one, whether PSSI keeps announcing new naturalizations - a gauge of how fast the resource is draining; two, whether FIFA moves to review the grandparent-born-on-territory criterion as the ASEAN naturalization wave accelerates; three, and most importantly, whether the Vietnam national team brings any overseas Vietnamese players into its next training camps.

I have kept this journal since March. On the last page I wrote one line: if Indonesia builds its house with imported bricks, we must learn to fire our own. That is not a slogan. That is what I believe after standing in that Jakarta press area, where people asked about passports instead of tactics.