Paes, Romeny and the Batavia Archive: Indonesia Builds a National Team Out of Genealogy

On the night of 5 September 2026, at the King Abdullah Sports City stadium in Jeddah, a 26-year-old man stood on his line, his eyes locked on Salem Al-Dawsari. His name is Maarten Paes. The second half of the Saudi Arabia–Indonesia fixture was drifting toward its final minutes, the score was still 0-0, and an entire World Cup qualifying campaign was hanging on the gloves of a goalkeeper born in Nijmegen.

I was in row seventeen, behind a block of Indonesian supporters in red and white. My waterproof pencil was still in my coat pocket, my notebook open on my knee. When Al-Dawsari stepped up, I wrote nothing. Only after Paes dived and the ball stayed out did I write a single line: “His grandmother was born in the Dutch East Indies.”

An international match settled by a save. But for that save to exist, another journey had to happen first — longer, colder, conducted in civil registry offices, on FIFA committee desks, and in votes cast in Indonesia's House of Representatives. Southeast Asian football has been rotating around an axis few in the stands ever see: paperwork.

They call me a dreamer. But the ball has never hidden anything from me. It only waits for me to read the right page.

A decade built out of files

Indonesia is not the first Southeast Asian nation to use naturalisation to strengthen a national team. But no one has done it with the system, the organisation and the political capital of the Indonesian Football Association (PSSI) over the past three years.

The first bricks were laid long ago. Cristian Gonzáles, a Uruguayan-born striker naturalised in 2026, was a controversial name for a decade. Stefano Lilipaly, Irfan Bachdim, then Ezra Walian and Marc Klok followed. The turning point came in February 2026, when Erick Thohir — a businessman who had run Indonesia's basketball federation — was elected PSSI chairman. The naturalisation list then grew with every international window: Jordi Amat, Sandy Walsh, Shayne Pattynama, Ivar Jenner, Rafael Struick, Elkan Baggott, then Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk, Nathan Tjoe-A-On, Jay Idzes, Ragnar Oratmangoen, Kevin Diks. And finally, the two names at the centre of this story — Maarten Paes and Ole Romeny.

What matters is the position, not just the number. Paes is a goalkeeper. Romeny is a centre-forward. Those are the two highest-leverage spots on a pitch: one prevents goals, the other creates them. For a national team that assembles for a few days per FIFA window, where back lines have almost no time to build understanding, a stable European-level goalkeeper is a bigger gift than any winger.

Romeny, meanwhile, answers a question Indonesian football had been asking for more than fifteen years, since the era of Bambang Pamungkas: who scores? Southeast Asian sides often have a playmaker, a workhorse full-back, but rarely a number nine cold enough to convert half-chances.

On the bench, the story shifted too. Shin Tae-yong, the South Korean who had led Indonesia since 2026 and built the squad's mental spine, left in early 2026. His replacement was Patrick Kluivert — a former Dutch striker who scored in the 2026 Champions League final. A Dutch coach leading an Indonesia side with nearly a dozen players raised in the Netherlands. That overlap is no coincidence; it is the consequence of a historical current.

Two doors, and a law that never asks about blood

To understand why Paes and Romeny can wear Indonesian red, you must walk through two entirely separate doors. Much of the online debate in Southeast Asia merges them into one, and so takes the wrong turn from the first question.

The first door is Indonesian citizenship law. Law No. 12 of 2026, Article 20, permits naturalisation in the national interest, or where the applicant has rendered services to the state. Unlike the ordinary route — years of continuous residence, income requirements, Indonesian language proficiency — Article 20 offers a shorter path that is not remotely easier, because it requires Indonesia's House of Representatives to vote on each individual case. This is the point rarely mentioned: every naturalised Indonesian player is a file on which parliament pressed a button, not a mere administrative decision.

The second door is FIFA's rulebook. The Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes allow a player to represent a federation where a parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory. The criterion is called the ‘substantial connection'. It exists to ensure players have a genuine geographical root with the shirt they wear, and to prevent the blatant purchase of national-team places.

What most fans miss: neither door asks a single question about ethnicity. Article 20 of Indonesian law asks about the national interest. FIFA's rule asks where a grandparent was born. Neither requires indigenous blood. That is the dispositive legal point — and the reason this became a debate about identity rather than about law.

Technically, Paes's file was the more delicate. He had represented the Netherlands at Under-21 level, meaning he had tied himself to another federation as a youth player. To switch to Indonesia he needed a change of association approved by FIFA. PSSI pursued it persistently for months, and in August 2026 it landed. Less than a month later, Paes was standing on his line in Jeddah.

Romeny took the shorter road. He took the citizenship oath in February 2026, debuted against Australia in Sydney in mid-March, and days later scored the only goal in a 1-0 win over Bahrain at Gelora Bung Karno in Jakarta on 25 March 2026.

Based on my own experience watching matches across the Asian qualifying rounds in recent years, I have noticed a fairly stable pattern: when a Southeast Asian national team has a goalkeeper playing in Europe, its goals-conceded average falls noticeably, because a weak defence is often shielded by a man who reads situations before the ball arrives. Paes belongs to that group. He does not merely save; he organises the line in front of him.

What actually happened on the pitch

Read only the scorelines and you would think Indonesia found a universal formula. Recent history shows a far more complex picture.

March 2026 was the hinge. Indonesia beat Vietnam 1-0 at Gelora Bung Karno, then won 3-0 in Hanoi days later. Those two results pushed Vietnam out of the second round of 2026 World Cup qualifying and carried Indonesia into the third round — the first time in decades. For Vietnamese fans it remains an unhealed cut. For Indonesians, it was proof of a new doctrine.

The third round placed Indonesia with Japan, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and China. A 0-0 draw in Jeddah opened it, Paes's penalty save becoming an icon. Then, on 20 March 2026, Indonesia lost 1-5 to Australia in Sydney — a match that laid bare the structural gap between a team assembled from several football cultures and one trained together from childhood. Five days later Romeny scored, Indonesia beat Bahrain 1-0, and belief returned.

Then, in October 2026 in Jeddah, Indonesia lost 2-3 to Saudi Arabia and 0-1 to Iraq. The World Cup door closed. This is the fact least emphasised in Vietnamese analysis: Indonesia were eliminated from 2026 World Cup qualifying while fielding the most naturalised squad in their history.

In the same window, on a different battlefield, Vietnam won the 2026 ASEAN Cup, beating Thailand 5-3 on aggregate across two legs in January 2026. Vietnam did it with a squad largely developed at home, plus a few carefully chosen naturalised faces — most notably Nguyễn Xuân Son, the Brazilian-born striker who proved himself across several V.League seasons before pulling on the national shirt. Two roads, two outcomes, one year.

In ranking terms, Indonesia climbed from outside the top 170 after their mid-2010s FIFA suspension back to around 120-130 by the mid-2020s. That comeback is real. But it came from several sources at once — youth investment, a better domestic league, a generation including Marselino Ferdinan and Rizky Ridho — and crediting it entirely to naturalisation is a convenient but distorted reduction.

A scoreboard cannot hold a heart, and football writes its poetry in exactly those places.

The contrarian angle: the so-called ‘legal loophole'

In recent Indonesian coverage, the word ‘loophole' appears often when Paes and Romeny are discussed. The framing is compelling but misplaced.

A legal loophole is a gap legislators never anticipated. The grandparent-birthplace criterion is a rule FIFA designed deliberately, has kept through multiple revisions, and has applied to hundreds of players worldwide for decades. It exists because football understands migration, war, families split by borders. Calling it a loophole denies the very logic FIFA built.

The confusion lies in equating eligibility with indigenous descent. They are different things, and no football legal system on earth requires a player to carry indigenous blood. If such a requirement existed, most European national teams would lose a great many players, and football would return to a definition of nationhood the world left behind long ago.

But that rebuttal does not mean Indonesia's model carries no risk. The real risk sits in three other places.

First, supply is finite and non-renewable. To qualify, a player needs a grandparent born on the territory of the Dutch East Indies — an entity that ceased to exist in the late 1940s. The people who can serve as that link today are in their eighties and nineties. Every passing year, fewer of them can pass the status to a grandchild. Indonesia is mining a seam that stopped forming three-quarters of a century ago. That is the fundamental difference between them and nations whose diasporas are still growing.

Second, the substitution effect on domestic academies. When starting places go to players raised in Europe, the incentive structure for a twenty-year-old Indonesian shifts for the worse. He can still be capped, but the path is narrower and steeper. In the medium term this can erode the very base that produced the Indonesia Under-23 side that reached the 2026 AFC U-23 Asian Cup semi-finals. A football nation living on naturalisation while neglecting its academies is borrowing from itself.

Third, and most warningly, the risk lives in files, not in rules. In 2026, Malaysian football became embroiled in a serious case concerning the documentation of naturalised players, leading FIFA to sanction the federation and individuals involved. Details are still being clarified, but the lesson is clear: what brings a federation down is not FIFA's criteria but a falsified birth certificate, a mistranslated document, a missing stamp. With nearly a dozen completed naturalisation files and more pending, Indonesia carries that risk at a larger scale than anyone in the region.

The regional race is heating up too. The Philippines has long leaned on its American diaspora. Malaysia follows a similar model. Thailand is taking its own steps. Even Vietnam is in the game: Filip Nguyễn and Patrik Lê Giang are Vietnamese-heritage goalkeepers who were naturalised and capped, while Nguyễn Xuân Son represents a performance-based route through the V.League. The difference lies in scale and in the nature of the supply. The Indo-Dutch community numbers in the hundreds of thousands, carries a professional football tradition, and sits inside Europe's elite youth systems. The overseas Vietnamese community is larger in total, but the number who pursue elite football is a fraction of that. It is a structural asymmetry, and administrative effort cannot erase it.

Finally, the risk comes from FIFA itself. If the naturalisation wave spreads across federations, and if cases like Malaysia's recur elsewhere, pressure to revise the grandparent-birthplace criterion will grow. For Indonesia, that scenario would shut the pipeline they spent three years building. It is the kind of risk no federation can manage alone, only prepare a retreat from.

What remains after the doors

I still keep my notebook, and its pages on Indonesia have thickened in recent years. My notebook still holds a few drops of Moscow rain. And I have learned not to mistake a completed file for a completed football nation.

69 years on, I still believe a beautiful pass is a love letter. But I also know a love letter only counts if the sender stays after the crowd has gone home.

On an empty pitch at night, I hear the ball breathing. That is the sound of seventeen-year-olds in Sleman, Kediri and Malang, who wake at four in the morning and still believe their road is open. Over the next three years, Indonesian football will answer a question no federation can answer for it: is naturalisation a bridge lifting the whole game, or a sealed room holding results in place before the historical door shuts for good?

For Vietnamese football, the lesson is not to copy a naturalisation file. It is to hold firm on the work no diaspora can do for us: produce a generation of centre-backs who can hold a line, midfielders who can hold a rhythm, and an academy that never stops producing people who believe in themselves.

When the radio goes on in the middle of the night, the pitch is asleep, and football knows how to wait. Our job is to be there when it wakes.