The Blood That Isn't on the Passport: Indonesia, Paes, Romeny and the Naturalization Revolution Rewriting Southeast Asian Football

On the grandmother's birth certificate, there is a place name.

That is all that is required. Not indigenous blood, not language, not childhood memory. Only a toponym written in ink that has faded, in a civil registry of the Dutch East Indies colonial administration, from almost a century ago.

Maarten Paes grew up in Nijmegen. He spoke Dutch before English, started catching balls as a small child, passed through the NEC and FC Utrecht academies, and then moved to the United States to play for FC Dallas. In 2026 he was called up to the Netherlands U21 side. In Jakarta at that time, almost nobody knew who he was.

Then, in the autumn of 2026, he stood in Indonesia's goal in front of tens of thousands of spectators at Gelora Bung Karno.

I remember watching that match very late at night, over a stuttering stream. What made me stop was not any particular save. It was the moment of the national anthem. Paes stood to attention, hand on his chest, lips moving. He did not know the words. He just stood there, letting the stands sing for him.

When the supporters sing, that is not noise — it is the heartbeat of a city.

And in that moment, a question larger than any match appeared: how does a person become part of a nation?

Four months later, another young man stood before the same question. Ole Romeny, born in 2026, also from Nijmegen, also formed in Dutch football, took the oath of Indonesian citizenship in February 2026. He plays centre-forward — the position Indonesian football had been desperately short of for two decades.

What is striking is this: in the sense of indigenous blood, neither Paes nor Romeny has a single drop of Indonesian blood.

And both are entirely legitimate.

This is the starting point of a story that regional media are telling wrongly, and also a story Vietnamese football needs to read correctly.

TWO DOORS, ONE CORRIDOR

Within three years, Indonesian football changed its face faster than any nation in Southeast Asia over the same period. The Indonesian Football Association, under chairman Erick Thohir, brought in a string of players born and raised in Europe: Jordi Amat, Sandy Walsh, Shayne Pattynama, Rafael Struick, Ivar Jenner, Justin Hubner, Jay Idzes, Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk, Kevin Diks, Mees Hilgers, Eliano Reijnders — and finally Paes and Romeny.

Half of them have genuine Indonesian ancestry, usually through a father or mother. The other half are more complicated, and Paes and Romeny are the two cases that represent that complication.

The story begins with a historical paradox. Before 2026, this archipelago was the Dutch East Indies — a colony ruled and exploited by the Dutch for more than three centuries. During that time there was a stratum of long-term European settlers, who married locals, had children on this soil. They were called the ones who stayed. Their descendants — after Indonesian independence and the wave of repatriation that swept through in the late 1950s — mostly returned to the Netherlands. But the birth certificates of the grandparent generation remained behind, hardened in administrative archives.

These are not forged documents. They are history.

And under the laws of football, that history has value.

There were two doors Paes and Romeny had to pass through. The first door is Indonesian law. Under Article 20 of Citizenship Law No. 12 of 2026, a foreign national may be naturalised as an Indonesian citizen if they bring benefit to the state, subject to approval by the House of Representatives. This is a clause designed for exceptional cases, not for a routine administrative process. Campaigning for a player to pass through this door requires time, connections and patience at the highest political level.

The second door is FIFA law. The Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes set out the criterion the profession usually calls substantial connection: a player is eligible to represent an association if he was born on its territory, or a biological parent, or a biological grandparent was born on its territory. This criterion is territorial at the moment of birth, not ethnic.

That is the whole story. Paes's grandmother was born in the Dutch East Indies. Romeny's grandmother too. Nothing more is required.

Paes's case has a layer of complexity that Romeny's does not. Paes had represented the Netherlands at U21 level, meaning he had already represented another association at youth level. To switch to Indonesia he had to go through a change of association — a mechanism FIFA permits only once in a player's career, and only if that player has never played a competitive senior international for the previous association. FIFA approved Paes's file in 2026. That is why he could stand in that goal in the autumn.

Romeny's case was procedurally simpler: he had never represented the Netherlands at any official senior level, so he only needed to complete the citizenship process, then take the oath, then wait.

One point must be emphasised: eligibility does not mean indigeneity. The two concepts are conflated in almost every regional article on this subject.

THE ONES WHO STAYED, AND A FINITE RESERVE

If you want to understand why Indonesia can do this while Vietnam or Thailand struggle to do it on the same scale, you have to look at the colonial map, not the FIFA ranking.

The Netherlands ruled the Indonesian archipelago for more than three hundred years. France ruled Vietnam for about sixty, with a far thinner civilian presence. The difference in duration and density of settlement produces a difference in the size of the mixed community. An estimated two million people in the Netherlands today have Indonesian roots — an enormous number compared with the Vietnamese diaspora in France, and more importantly, a substantial proportion of them have grandparents born on Indonesian soil.

This is a treasure that Indonesian football is mining. But it is also a mine with limits.

Such a resource cannot regenerate. Once the last generation of grandparents passes away, and the fourth generation of great-grandchildren no longer satisfies the grandparent-born-locally criterion, this pipeline will run dry. Indonesian football may be spending its entire historical allowance within a single decade.

Meanwhile, an overseas Vietnamese player born in Prague or Paris whose parents are clearly Vietnamese is a renewable resource — but far smaller in number, and often less developed at elite European level. Filip Nguyen, the goalkeeper born in the Czech Republic, is the rare example Vietnamese football has. It is not a movement. It is a single case.

That difference shapes the entire game.

THE TWO MOST VALUABLE POSITIONS ON THE PITCH

What is notable about how Indonesia chose its people is not the quantity, but the positions.

Goalkeeper and centre-forward are the two positions with the greatest single-player leverage in football. A good goalkeeper can cover an inexperienced defence, especially at national-team level — where centre-backs train together only a few days each international window and have almost no time to build mutual understanding. A good centre-forward can turn a match in which the team underperforms into three points.

Paes is the number one goalkeeper. Romeny is the centre-forward. Indonesia did not spread money across every position; it reinforced the spine.

This is strategic logic, not sentimental logic. If you have the resources to naturalise only two players in a cycle, the optimal positions are the goalmouth and the opposition penalty area. A naturalised full-back helps, but does not change the nature of the match. A naturalised goalkeeper can.

There is a risk that comes with this, however, that few analyses are willing to state: single-point dependency is the most fragile model in football. If Paes is injured, or if Romeny loses form, the entire narrative of elevated strength exposes its gap. Indonesian football still has no equivalent-standard contingency for either position.

THE COST IS NOT ON THE TRANSFER LEDGER

In the transfer market, a goalkeeper who has played for the Netherlands U21 and starts in MLS is worth several million euros. A 24-year-old forward playing in the English second tier is worth something similar.

Indonesia paid nothing in either case.

But to say these deals were free is to misunderstand the economics of naturalisation. The real cost lies in three other places. First, administrative and legal cost: files, lawyers, change-of-association procedures, the campaign for parliamentary approval. Second, political cost: every naturalisation case is a reputational investment by the association, and if it fails, the loss is also reputational. Third, opportunity cost: every national-team slot given to a naturalised player is a slot not given to a player developed in a domestic academy.

There is a structurally worrying point here. When an association finds a talent-supply channel of high quality at zero transfer cost, the incentive to invest in academies weakens. Why wait ten years to develop a goalkeeper when you can import a finished one in eighteen months?

That question sounds very reasonable. And precisely because it sounds reasonable, it is dangerous.

LOOPHOLE OR DESIGNED DOOR?

Indonesian media — including serious outlets such as Kompas — have called these two cases exceptional and implied that they pass through a legal loophole.

That framing is technically wrong.

The grandparent-born-on-territory criterion is not a bug in FIFA's rulebook. It is a deliberately written provision, born from the experience of African and European football, where migration flows and colonial borders left millions of families legally divided. FIFA deliberately chose a territorial criterion over a blood criterion, because a blood criterion is something that cannot be defined and cannot be verified.

If you start asking how much indigenous blood a person needs before being considered indigenous, you have stepped onto territory no legal system wants to enter.

Skin colour does not determine talent, but it determines how people look at you. Paes has a European face, light hair, and a name that cannot be pronounced the Indonesian way. He will forever be looked at with suspicion to a degree that a mixed-heritage player is not. That is a truth that appears in no legal text.

And this is where the real risk lies. Not in a courtroom, but in the stands.

If Indonesia wins, Paes is Indonesian. If Indonesia loses, and if Paes makes a mistake, he becomes the Dutchman who came to take the place of a Jakarta kid. This reputational balance is cruelly asymmetric: one failure will cause far greater damage than the benefit a victory brings.

There is another detail regional media barely mention. Indonesia does not recognise dual nationality for adults. Paes and Romeny had to renounce their Dutch citizenship in order to wear Indonesia's shirt. That is not a small paperwork matter. It is the severing of a legal thread with the place where you were born, where your family lives, where you could return at any point in a playing career.

People call them mercenaries. But a mercenary does not renounce his own passport.

AND THIS IS WHERE VIETNAMESE FOOTBALL NEEDS TO LOOK

I have followed Southeast Asian football for many years, and what I have learned is this: in this region, advantages never last long.

Thailand had a long decade as the benchmark of regional football — until Vietnam overtook them with a generation of well-coached players and a consistent playing philosophy. Vietnam was once held up as the model of sustainable development — until Indonesia chose a different path, faster and louder.

Indonesia reached the third round of 2026 World Cup qualifying, drawn in a group with Japan, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and China. That is a merciless group. Any point earned there is worth many times a win in regional qualifying.

Indonesia's model — a football nation buying ready-made talent rather than patiently developing it — is not something Vietnam can copy wholesale. Vietnam does not have a large enough colonial-descendant community to open such a pipeline. But that is not the only lesson.

The real lesson is this: the regional game is accelerating, and Vietnam is playing a long game while its rivals play a short one that may end before the long game resolves.

Does that mean the Vietnam Football Federation should join the naturalisation race? Not necessarily. But it does mean that over the next twenty years, if Vietnam relies solely on domestic development without opening any channel to draw on the overseas community, the regional resource gap will keep widening.

There is a historical irony here. The countries colonised longest are benefiting most from the colonial inheritance embedded in modern football. The Netherlands left Indonesia a civil registry. France left Vietnam an education system and a much smaller diaspora community. The ball is round, but fate is never round — it rolls through the cracks of history.

And if Indonesia succeeds, other associations in the region will look at it. The Philippines has been doing something similar for years. Malaysia is studying it. Thailand has mixed-heritage players called up to the national team. A naturalisation race within ASEAN is plausible within one to three years.

What happens to regional football when every association chases the same strategy? The advantage erodes. And the only thing left is the thing that cannot be imported: cohesion.

WHAT REMAINS AFTER THE CRAZE

I do not know whether Paes will become the greatest goalkeeper in Indonesian football history. Nobody knows. He has only just begun.

But I know this: when I watch the footage of that anthem moment again, I see a young man who does not know where to put his hands. He stands among tens of thousands of people who are strangers to him, in a uniform that belongs to a place he was not born in, singing a song he does not understand.

And I wonder: is that not also what every immigrant in the world goes through? Standing in a room full of people unlike yourself, trying to learn a song, and hoping that one day the singing of those around you will become your own voice.

Football does not solve that question. But football poses it most publicly, on a pitch, in front of thousands of cameras.

I write about football, but really I am writing about people.

Indonesia will go into their next match with a light-haired goalkeeper. And across this region, every other association will watch with a single question: is this the road, or merely a shortcut?

The answer is not on the league table. It lies in what Indonesian football still has left in twenty years, when the pipeline has run dry.