Paes and Romeny: Indonesia Walked Through Two Legal Gates, Not a Loophole

On 8 August 2026, FIFA's TMS system logged an administrative change: Maarten Paes's federation moved from the Netherlands to Indonesia. There was no unveiling ceremony, no light show in Jakarta. Just a single line of data, the kind nobody reads until somebody is forced to read it.

Six months later, in February 2026, Ole Romeny took the oath of Indonesian citizenship, closing the procedural loop the DPR had already approved. Again, no loud applause. But once Kompas and then the regional press started combing through the files, an odd question surfaced in print: do these two players have indigenous blood?

The answer is no. And that answer is where the legal story begins, not where it ends.

Two gates, not one

Every naturalised player must pass through two entirely separate gates, and the two gates do not test the same thing.

The first gate is Indonesian citizenship law. Law No. 12/2026, specifically Article 20, permits naturalisation on grounds of national interest. The clause is discretionary: the state may grant citizenship to an individual if it deems the move beneficial, and the decision must be ratified by the DPR, Indonesia's House of Representatives. This is an administrative route. It does not ask about lineage.

The second gate is FIFA's rulebook. The substantial-connection requirement sits in the Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes, known as RGAS. A player may represent a federation if a biological parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory. No indigenous-blood test either. Only a question about where one person in the family tree was born.

For Paes and Romeny, the second gate opened through the grandparent line: people born in the Dutch East Indies, the former Dutch colony that is now Indonesian territory. Among Indo-Dutch communities, the term blijvers survives, describing European settlers who stayed long in the Indies, married, had children, and left behind a mixed population still legally anchored to Indonesian soil.

Paes's case is the more delicate one. He had represented the Netherlands at under-21 level, which meant he needed a federation transfer, the one-time change of association FIFA allows for players capped at youth level elsewhere. FIFA approved it in August 2026.

Paes was born in 2026 and plays in goal. Romeny plays up front. Those two positions are not coincidence. Goalkeeper and centre-forward are the two slots where a single individual bends results more than anywhere else. If a federation gets to reinforce exactly two positions, these are the two it picks.

The price is off the balance sheet

On the financial ledger, this is a deal with no transfer fee. Not a cent flowed from PSSI's budget to a European club. But free in football has never meant free.

The cost here is administrative, legal and political capital. The record shows PSSI pursued Paes's federation transfer persistently over a long period, meaning resources were poured in that no balance sheet records. I call it an eligibility premium: the outlay that buys a federation the right to use a player without paying his club a cent.

When Article 20 of Indonesia's Citizenship Law sits on the deliberation table, I think of the way Neymar stepped over FIFA's Article 17 without ever glancing down at his feet. Both cases teach the same lesson: when the law permits, people walk through. The argument afterwards is pure emotion.

What matters more than the value of the two players is the nature of the supply. That supply does not behave like a market. It is a finite, non-renewable historical population. Every time an Indo-Dutch descendant is called up, one fewer remains. No academy manufactures more of this supply.

Placing Indonesia beside Vietnam

Indonesia's edge is structural, not tactical. Dutch colonialism left behind an Indo-European community large enough to sustain a pipeline of professionals raised in Europe, trained in Dutch and Belgian youth systems or higher European divisions.

Vietnam has an overseas community, but most of it formed after 2026 and is not tied to a colonial territory with a Western football structure. Thailand is the same. Put differently, Vietnam does not have the same mine to dig. The difference is historical, not one of administrative competence.

On squad value, this is the first time in decades Indonesia can narrow the gap with Vietnam and Thailand using a resource that does not come from its domestic league. As a result, they are running their national team on the model of a buying club: importing finished individuals rather than developing them. That model lifts the ceiling fast in the short term. It leaves an open question about the long-term pipeline.

Drawing on my experience tracking matches in regional qualifiers, I notice a common pattern in rapidly assembled national teams: the first three or four games look good, then comes a painful gelling phase. National teams have no season to train in. They get three days and one match.

Meanwhile, the Philippines and Malaysia are walking the same road. When several federations exploit the same criterion, the value of that criterion falls. Competitive advantage becomes temporary advantage.

Where I have to be blunt

Calling this a legal loophole is technically wrong. The grandparent-birthplace criterion is a designed rule, not a system bug. It exists in RGAS because FIFA wants federations to be able to reclaim players who drifted from their roots. Eligibility does not equal indigenous blood, and FIFA has never demanded the second.

The paradox lies elsewhere. Indonesia's biggest risk is not in a courtroom, it is in the academy. Naturalisation is substituting for youth development, not complementing it. A football nation that only buys and never plants must keep buying, and the mine is finite.

There is a cost nobody accounts for: international minutes taken away from domestically developed players. A 22-year-old striker groomed in an Indonesian academy loses his place to a 25-year-old raised in Europe. That loss appears in no financial report, but it compounds every transfer window.

Transfer bubbles do not burst because prices are outrageous. They burst because people forget a contract is paper, and paper burns. So are statutes. If FIFA tightens its reading of the grandparent criterion in the next few years, Indonesia loses its edge without losing a single match.

And there is an asymmetric risk few mention: one failed eligibility file in the future would do far more damage than the benefit two successful ones deliver. One paperwork error, and an entire strategy gets dissected on the operating table.

What remains

Paes and Romeny have passed both gates. Legally, there is nothing left to argue. What deserves attention is what happens next.

When the family-tree mine runs dry, where will Indonesia stand, on the pitch, on its own two feet? And while waiting for that answer, should Vietnamese football ask itself a parallel question: if this region is about to enter a phase where World Cup tickets are partly won on paper, will the rest of it, the part decided by technical quality and cohesion, still be enough to hold position?