Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny and Indonesia's spine: how a federation bought football's two highest-leverage positions

Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny and Indonesia's spine: how a federation bought football's two highest-leverage positions

(00) A starting eleven that looks like nobody else's

On 8 February 2026, in a meeting room in Jakarta, a twenty-four-year-old man raised his right hand and read an oath in Indonesian. He read slowly, as though checking whether each syllable landed in the right place. His parents sat in the front row. In Nijmegen — the city where he was born and learned to play on wet, cold pitches — the evening sports bulletin gave that event not a single second.

Four months earlier, in a similar room, a twenty-six-year-old goalkeeper had read a nearly identical oath. He stands one metre ninety-one, catches with both hands, and once stood between the posts for the Netherlands Under-21 side. His name is Maarten Paes.

What made me stop at these two names is not their personal stories. It is something else: when Indonesia walked out at Gelora Bung Karno during the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, the starting eleven contained more players born in the Netherlands than players born in Indonesia itself.

That is a strange moment, tactically. Not because it is good or bad, but because it forces a very old question back onto the table: what is a national team built out of?

Every match is a maze; I only redraw the map. And this map has two large markers sitting at either end of the spine — a goalkeeper and a centre-forward.

(01) Context variables: read them before drawing the shape

I have kept one habit since 2026, when I had to collect data on one hundred and eighty J.League matches played behind closed doors: before saying anything about a team, I list the variables that do not appear on the tactics board. The same eleven, the same shape, can produce two completely different matches because of travel load and crowd noise.

With Indonesia, the context variables come in four layers.

The first is historical geography. Indonesia was a Dutch colony for more than three centuries, from the early seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Throughout that period, large numbers of Dutch and other Europeans settled in Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi. Many stayed for good. Historians of the Indies gave them a name: blijvers — those who remained.

That layer is the foundation of the whole story. Without it there is no Maarten Paes, no Ole Romeny, and no debate at all.

The second layer is the calendar. The Asian qualifying campaign for the 2026 World Cup runs in dense cycles, with intercontinental journeys of dozens of hours. A Europe-based player has to land in Jakarta in the middle of the European winter, play in humidity above ninety per cent, and fly back within seventy-two hours. That variable directly affects execution quality, and it is routinely ignored when people argue about passports.

The third is the crowd. Gelora Bung Karno, with a capacity above seventy thousand, is not a stadium so much as a resonance chamber. In my master's research I showed that crowd noise raises the home team's passing tempo. For Indonesia that variable carries more weight than usual, because an entire national strategy depends on turning the home ground into a psychological fortress.

The fourth is the federation's internal politics. Since 2026, PSSI — the Football Association of Indonesia — has placed a diaspora recruitment programme at the very top of its national-team strategy. That is a governance decision, not a technical one, and it shapes most of what happens on the pitch afterwards.

Stack those four layers and you get the context that any analysis of Paes and Romeny has to pass through first.

(02) The road through qualifying, and how it was rewritten

To understand why these two names matter so much, you have to go back to a specific moment.

On 21 March 2026, Indonesia beat Vietnam 1-0 in Jakarta. Five days later, on 26 March 2026, Indonesia beat Vietnam 3-0 in Hanoi. Both matches belonged to the second round of Asian qualifying for the 2026 World Cup, and they pushed Vietnam out of the race before it was even half run.

What matters is how Indonesia won them: with an eleven already beginning to blend. Jay Idzes scored in Hanoi. Ragnar Oratmangoen scored in Hanoi. Those names had started to thicken in the squad lists, and by the end of 2026 they had become the default.

Indonesia moved into the third round, drawn with Japan, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and China. That was a group Indonesia could previously only dream of surviving. They did survive it, finishing inside the top four and earning a place in the fourth round.

I want to stop on one detail inside that run of results: Indonesia's 1-0 home win over Bahrain, with the only goal scored by Ole Romeny. A naturalised striker scoring the decisive goal in a match Indonesia had to win to keep their ticket. That goal is the entire justification for the naturalisation programme, compressed into a single moment.

Then, in January 2026, the Korean coach Shin Tae-yong — the man who laid the foundation for the whole transition — was replaced by Patrick Kluivert, a Dutchman.

There is a logic here that needs reading correctly. Appointing Kluivert was not purely a technical decision. A Dutch coach leading a national team with nearly a dozen players born and raised in the Netherlands is a cultural governance solution. You solve the integration problem by placing a man who speaks the same language in command. Tactics are the only thing that survives once reflexes stop working, but language survives before tactics even begin.

(03) The Paes file: a pair of imported gloves

Maarten Paes was born in 2026 in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He came through NEC Nijmegen before moving to FC Utrecht and then to FC Dallas in Major League Soccer.

Purely as a footballer, Paes belongs to the technically sound bracket. His one metre ninety-one gives him a clear advantage inside the box, especially in aerial situations — a staple of South-East Asian football. His ability with the ball at his feet suits a side that wants to build from the back, which is the direction Kluivert is pointing.

The more important analytical detail lies elsewhere: Paes has represented the Netherlands at Under-21 level. He belonged to the group of young players the Dutch federation tracked at European level. His switch to Indonesia in 2026 meant he had to pass through FIFA's change-of-association procedure — a mechanism that can be used only once in a career and comes with very specific conditions.

I will deal with that procedure in detail later. For now, the point to register is that Paes cleared both gates: the Indonesian citizenship gate and the FIFA eligibility gate.

Structurally, placing a goalkeeper with a European background in the number-one slot produces a far larger stabilising effect than naturalising a full-back or a wide midfielder.

This is the point the media usually skips. At national-team level, a back four almost always has low familiarity, because the players arrive from different clubs and train together for only a few days each window. In that environment, the goalkeeper is the only man who sees the entire defensive line for ninety minutes. A goalkeeper with clear rules for coming and staying, and the ability to shout at the right moment, can compensate for a back four that has not yet gelled.

Put another way: investing in the number-one position is investing in the lowest layer of the defensive system. It does not create goals, but it lowers the probability of conceding in every situation — and lowering probability is a compounding effect across matches.

The Japanese taught me that being two goals ahead is still not a match. For Indonesia, keeping a clean sheet is the condition for survival in a group containing Japan and Australia.

(04) The Romeny file: a number nine that does not exist at home

Ole Romeny was born in 2026, also in Nijmegen. He came through NEC Nijmegen, moved to FC Utrecht, and in early 2026 joined Oxford United in the English Championship.

Tactically, Romeny belongs to the modern centre-forward template: not a pure penalty-box poacher waiting for the ball, but a mover between the lines. He can drop to receive in the space between the opponent's midfield and defensive lines, drag a centre-back out of position, and open room for runners arriving from the second line.

That type is rarely produced in South-East Asia. Not for lack of talent, but because youth systems in the region tend to organise matches in a way that rewards reflexes over reading space. A striker trained in the V.League or the Thai League is coached to exploit the moment: a reflex inside the box, the right contact point. A striker raised in the Netherlands is coached to create the moment: to move so that a gap exists before his team-mate can see it.

Romeny scored the only goal in Indonesia's 1-0 home win over Bahrain — a goal that arrived after a period in which Indonesia were judged to be stalling in chance creation.

For a team with a low chance-conversion rate, replacing a domestic striker with one who matured in Europe has a bigger effect than a swap in any other position. Because in football the number of goals required to change a result is tiny. One. Two. Along the spine, one good player can turn one point into three, and three points can turn one fourth-round ticket into another.

In the transfer market, the fool looks at value; I look at timing.

Romeny was naturalised and installed exactly when Indonesia needed a scorer in knockout matches. Not two years earlier, when the team was still building. Not a year later, when the cycle had closed. Timing is everything.

(05) Why goalkeeper and striker are the two highest-leverage positions

This is the analysis I consider most important, and also the part regional media gets most wrong.

When people discuss naturalisation, they usually reason in simple quantities: add a good player, the team gets better. That reasoning ignores structure. Inside a team, positions do not carry equal weight. The value of a replacement depends on touch volume, on the number of decisions that position must make in a match, and on how far mistakes there can be covered.

Apply those three criteria.

The goalkeeper has few touches, but every decision carries an extreme consequence: either he makes the save or the ball is in the net. There is no buffer zone. A defender who errs can be covered by a team-mate. A goalkeeper who errs puts a goal on the scoreboard. At the same time, the goalkeeper is the only position where the absence of a good individual can only be filled by a worse one, immediately, with no rotation mechanism at national-team level.

The striker works the same way but through an inverse mechanism. Few touches, most of them inside the final eighteen metres, where the expected value of a correct action is the highest on the pitch. A striker converting at an above-average rate moves results faster than anyone else.

For Indonesia, naturalising precisely into those two positions is not an accident. It is a strategic choice — or a lucky choice made at the right time. I lean towards the first, because PSSI pursued the Paes file persistently over a long period before everything was completed.

Here I have to say something about how we read data. For years, xG — expected goals — has been the default tool in every football argument. I think it has been overused. xG measures the probability of a shot given position and context. It does not measure a striker's decision about whether to shoot. It does not measure a goalkeeper's decision about whether to come or stay. It does not measure whether a referee gives the foul.

In other words, xG describes the final product of a process, not the process. In international matches — small samples, opponents that differ completely from one window to the next — xG becomes even less valuable. I have tracked matches differently: logging each player's position in the moments before the ball arrives. It is far harder work, but it gives me what xG cannot: the reason behind the number.

And in the case of Paes and Romeny, the reason lies in their position on the spine. Indonesia did not buy a player. Indonesia bought two anchor points.

(06) Two legal gates: one national law, one football regulation

This is where I believe Indonesian media has described things inaccurately.

Two independent rule systems control this entire story, and both must be satisfied at once.

The first gate is Indonesian citizenship law. Law No. 12 of 2026 on the Citizenship of Indonesia sets out the conditions under which a foreign national becomes an Indonesian citizen. For naturalisation on state-interest grounds, the file must be approved by Indonesia's House of Representatives, the DPR. That is a political procedure more than a judicial one. It demands political capital, time, and cross-party agreement.

Every file in the recent naturalisation wave passed through that gate, and Paes and Romeny are no exception.

The second gate is FIFA's regulation — specifically the FIFA Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes, usually abbreviated as RGAS. That document defines the conditions under which a player is permitted to represent a national team. Among them is the criterion directly relevant here: a player is eligible if a biological grandparent or parent was born on the territory of that federation.

That is the crux. The criterion does not require indigenous ancestry. It requires a biological link to territory, established through the birthplace of someone within the last two generations.

Eligibility to play and indigenous ancestry are two different concepts, and FIFA has never treated them as the same thing.

This is not a loophole that somebody discovered and exploited. It is a deliberately designed criterion, present in FIFA's regulations across several editions, applied to hundreds of players worldwide every year.

I say this not to defend anyone. I say it because analysing the nature of a problem correctly is the condition for analysing its consequences correctly. If people believe this is a hole, they will expect it to be closed. If people understand it is a designed rule, they will understand that it will persist, and that what must change is their own strategy.

One technical caveat: citations of specific RGAS article numbers should be verified against the version currently in force. The regulations are revised periodically and article numbers shift between editions. Any analysis citing an article number without naming the version should be read with caution.

(07) Paes and the change-of-association mechanism: the detail sits at the edge of the law

Paes's case is more complex than Romeny's, and it deserves its own section.

Romeny had never represented any national team at official level. For him the path is relatively straight: establish Indonesian citizenship, prove the territorial link, register with FIFA.

Paes is different. He represented the Netherlands at Under-21 level. That triggers a separate mechanism inside FIFA's regulations: change of association.

That mechanism allows a player who has represented one federation at youth level to switch to another, provided he has never played for the senior national team of the old federation in an official match. And it can be used only once in an entire career.

With Paes, this is the detail sitting at the edge of the law: he played at Under-21 level at an age when many players are already crossing into senior football.

That does not make his file invalid. FIFA approved the change of association for Paes in August 2026. But it makes his file a notable precedent, because it establishes a clear frontier for how a young player capped by a European youth side can return to serve a different country.

For South-East Asian football, that precedent has enormous practical value. Across the region there are dozens, possibly hundreds of young players of South-East Asian descent being developed in European academies. Each of them, at some point, will have to decide whom they want to represent.

The change-of-association mechanism is the door they must walk through. And as I said, that door opens only once.

(08) Blijvers: a historical oil field and its limits

This is the section I consider most important for long-term strategy, and also the one almost nobody discusses.

Indonesia can naturalise Paes, Romeny, Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk, Jay Idzes, Mees Hilgers, Kevin Diks and Eliano Reijnders for one reason only: a population of Europeans lived in the Indies for generations and left descendants who hold European passports but have grandparents born on Indonesian territory.

That population has a property any policymaker must look straight in the eye: it is finite and non-renewable.

The last generation of Dutch and continental Europeans born in the Indies arrived more than seventy years ago. The next generation — their children — was born in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Australia. By the generation of Paes's and Romeny's parents, many still had parents born in Indonesia. By the generation of Paes and Romeny themselves, their grandparents are the last people still holding a direct biological link to the territory.

Which means: by the generation of Paes's and Romeny's children, the grandparent-birthplace criterion will no longer be satisfiable. That window is slowly closing.

I do not say this to predict an ending. I say it to point out that any strategy resting on a finite resource needs a transition plan.

Indonesia has a diaspora advantage that Vietnam, Thailand or the Philippines do not have at the same scale. That is a real advantage. But a time-limited advantage is not a permanent one.

And here I want to say something about youth development. For years I have watched former stars open youth academies across Asia. Most of them are commercial operations wearing a personal brand. High fees, good facilities, good media imagery, and one structural hole: no sufficiently strong coach-education system at grassroots level, so the children trained there cannot keep developing past fifteen.

South-East Asia's problem is not a shortage of academies. It is a shortage of people who teach football at grassroots level — people who can teach a nine-year-old to see a gap before it opens. Naturalisation is a solution to today's problem. It is not a solution to the problem twenty years from now.

An empty stadium is football's coldest laboratory. And in that laboratory you learn that the variables that look smallest — noise, distance, preparation time — decide results the most.

(09) The economics of a deal with no transfer fee

There is one thing I want to make analytically clear: naturalisation is not a transfer.

There is no transfer fee. No release clause. No club-level wage structure. From the perspective of the traditional transfer market, it is a deal priced at zero.

But a price of zero does not mean a cost of zero. The cost simply shifts into another currency: administrative capital, political capital, and time capital.

A naturalisation file has to pass through committees, through the House of Representatives, through the administrative machine, through background verification, through diplomatic missions. It needs a person or a group of people responsible for pursuing it over many months, sometimes years. It needs political consensus in an environment where every consensus has a price.

In Paes's case, Indonesian reporting noted that the federation pursued the file persistently over an extended period. That is an understatement. It is hundreds of hours of work by people who never appear on television.

This is a talent-acquisition channel running parallel to the transfer market, and it operates in a currency clubs do not possess: state authority.

For South-East Asian nations, this is a model worth reading correctly. It does not require a transfer budget. It requires a federation with administrative competence and political backing. That is the barrier to entry, and it is lower than competing financially with European clubs.

That is why the model is likely to spread across the region.

(10) Vietnam, seen from the other side of the map

I am writing this from Osaka, but I am reading it from Hanoi.

For Vietnam, the Indonesian story is not a distant one. It is immediate, and it already has concrete results: two defeats in March 2026, and elimination from 2026 World Cup qualifying while the campaign was still young.

Afterwards, Vietnam did something important: they won the ASEAN Championship in January 2026, beating Thailand in the final. That was a significant achievement, built mainly on a domestically sourced squad with a few additions.

But that squad also contained naturalised names. Nguyen Filip, a goalkeeper born in Czechia, acquired Vietnamese citizenship and played for the national team. Jason Pendant Quang Vinh, a defender born in France, did the same. And Nguyen Xuan Son — Nam Dinh's Brazilian-born striker — scored in the ASEAN Championship final before suffering a serious injury in the second leg in Bangkok.

I raise this not to criticise. I raise it because any debate about naturalisation in South-East Asia has to begin from an uncomfortable fact: Vietnam and Indonesia are walking the same road, differing only in scale and speed.

The difference lies in diaspora resources. Vietnam has a large overseas community, but most of it consists of people who emigrated within the last half-century, not descendants of colonisers who stayed. The territorial link therefore has a different shape: it runs through close family relations rather than through a historical stratum.

That makes Vietnam's resource narrower in scale but potentially deeper in attachment. A Viet kieu player whose parents are Vietnamese usually has a different level of cultural connection than a player whose grandparents were born in the Indies but who has never set foot in Indonesia.

But I do not want to romanticise this. In football, cultural connection does not score goals. And in a region where the gap between the leading national teams is narrowing, adding one player of European quality in the right leverage position can matter far more than fielding a cohesive squad that lacks quality along the spine.

Based on my experience tracking matches, I notice a clear pattern: in matches between South-East Asian national teams, the gap in individual quality along the spine usually decides results more than the gap in team organisation. Because in matches where both sides play cautiously, the number of clear chances is small, and whoever converts the rare chance wins.

That is the entire logic of Indonesia over the past two years.

(11) The passport race in ASEAN

Indonesia is not the only country in the region pursuing this model.

Philippines has naturalised players for years, with a programme focused on Filipinos abroad. Malaysia runs something similar and has fielded many foreign-born players. Thailand, though quieter about it, has also used players of foreign origin in regional tournaments.

Which means Indonesia's advantage is relative. If every country in the region naturalises, the marginal value of naturalising falls.

That is a classic economic paradox: when a strategy works, everyone copies it, and when everyone copies it, it stops working.

But there is a distinction I want to stress. Most South-East Asian nations naturalise players with clear indigenous ancestry — children of migrants, grandchildren of labourers. Indonesia naturalised a group with a different historical profile: descendants of European colonisers who stayed.

The second group carries a physical and technical advantage at European level, but a larger cultural distance from the rest of the population.

That is the price, and it will surface in specific moments: when the team is behind away from home, when a match is played in brutal conditions, when pressure from the stands becomes heavy. In those moments, cohesion is not produced by citizenship on paper.

Matches repeat, but obsessions do not.

(12) Dressing-room chemistry: the part nobody can measure

And this is the part no metric can capture.

A national team is not a club. At club level, players train together daily, eat together, live in the same city. At national-team level they meet for a few days each month and must become a team within that window.

When you insert nearly a dozen players raised in another country, you are not only adding quality. You are adding an organisational problem.

Who speaks which language in the dressing room? Who has to translate? Who bridges the European group and the domestic group? Who has a voice in team meetings? Who feels entitled to speak up when the team is three goals down?

Appointing the Dutch coach Patrick Kluivert in early 2026 solves part of this. A Dutch speaker who understands the Dutch football system and played at the top of European football can talk to that group on a different frequency.

But it also creates a new problem: the distance between the naturalised group and the domestically developed group can widen rather than close, if the man in charge is perceived as belonging to one side.

Every team is a ninety-minute sentence. And a sentence only means something when the speaker understands the listener.

(13) The contrarian angle: the blind spot is not in the law

This is the section I want to separate out, because it runs against the conventional reading of this story.

The conventional reading goes like this: Indonesia found a legal loophole, exploited it, and thereby bought short-term success without paying a price.

I think all three propositions in that reading are wrong.

The first is wrong because the grandparent-birthplace criterion is a designed rule, present in FIFA's regulations across multiple editions, applied to hundreds of cases worldwide. Calling it a loophole is a moral framing, not a legal one.

The second is wrong because Indonesia did pay — in administrative capital, political capital, and time. Every naturalisation file is a stretch of time the federation must spend on procedure instead of on grassroots development.

The third is the one I care about most. Indonesia did not only pay administratively. They paid with something harder to see: dependence on a non-renewable resource, and the erosion of the incentive to develop domestic football.

Think about this from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old Indonesian player in Liga 1. He looks up at the national team and what does he see? A goal occupied by a goalkeeper born in Nijmegen. An attack containing a striker born in Nijmegen. A defence with three or four players born in Europe. And he understands that his chance depends on whether the federation can find someone with a grandparent born in Indonesia.

That is a policy signal. And policy signals shape behaviour.

In development economics, this is called the substitution effect. When you can import a product more cheaply than producing it, you stop producing it. That holds for goods. It also holds for football talent.

I am not saying Indonesia will stop producing players. I am saying that every national-team slot taken by a naturalised player is a slot taken from a domestic player — and those slots are economic incentives, career targets, and the reason a family lets a child pursue professional football.

There is a second blind spot, and it belongs to the media.

When Indonesian press calls these special cases, and when it uses language about players with no indigenous blood, it is conducting a social legitimacy audit, not a legal one. The implicit question is: do these players belong to us?

That is a fair question, but it is not a football question. It is a question about national identity in a world where ethnic boundaries have become far more complicated than they were in the twentieth century.

And in football, its practical consequences are very concrete. A national team disputed over identity is a national team with a psychological weak point. That weak point does not appear in wins. It appears in defeats — in the eightieth minute, when the team is a goal down, when the jeers begin from the stands.

There are minutes of stoppage time in which an entire generation learns how to lose. And there are also minutes of stoppage time in which an entire national strategy learns that it has forgotten something.

(14) What to verify in the next match

I offer no predictions. I offer checkpoints.

One: dressing-room chemistry. When Indonesia go behind in an important away match, watch the reactions of the naturalised group and the domestic group. If they react as two separate groups, that is a sign of a structural problem. If they react as one block, the model is working.

Two: dependence on the spine. If Paes or Romeny is absent through injury or suspension, watch the defensive quality and the ability to convert chances. A strategy resting on two anchors will be tested precisely when an anchor is removed.

Three: signals from the diaspora pipeline. Track the next squad list. If the frequency of new cases falls, that may signal an increasingly difficult search. If it rises, that signals a model being normalised.

Four: the reaction of other regional federations. If the Philippines or Malaysia announce a naturalisation programme of comparable scale within the next eighteen months, Indonesia's advantage will begin to erode.

Tactics are the only thing that survives once reflexes stop working. And in a region where every nation is learning to copy every other, what lasts longest is not what is bought, but what is built.

Maarten Paes and Ole Romeny will wear the red and white and stand at either end of Indonesia's spine in the matches to come. They deserve to be judged by what they do on the pitch, not by where they were born. But the strategy that put them there — with limits that are becoming clearer by the month — is what the rest of South-East Asia needs to read most carefully.

Every match is a maze; I only redraw the map. This map has two red dots at either end of the spine, and a boundary line fading at the back.