Indonesia and Two Passports: Paes, Romeny, and How PSSI Bought Back Time

In February 2026, in Jakarta, Ole Romeny signed the oath document granting him Indonesian citizenship. No negotiation between two clubs took place. No transfer fee was disclosed. No release clause was triggered. Yet a few weeks later, Indonesia's national squad list contained one more forward developed in Europe, and the balance of power in Southeast Asia had to be recalculated.

Before that, goalkeeper Maarten Paes, born in 2026, completed his federation transfer and was approved by FIFA in August 2026. He had previously played for the Netherlands U21 side. FIFA's change-of-association window opens only once in a career, and Paes walked through it at exactly the right moment.

The part worth pausing on lies in the bloodline. Paes and Romeny carry no indigenous Indonesian ancestry. Both remain fully eligible. What Indonesian media calls an "exceptional case" is in fact a process written into law long ago, simply waiting for qualifying people to appear.

Two gates, not one

To understand this deal, it must be separated from transfer language. No club sold. No club bought. Two legal gates simply opened in parallel.

The first gate is Article 20 of Indonesia's Citizenship Law No. 12 of 2026, which permits naturalization in the national interest, subject to approval by the House of Representatives. This is a deliberate administrative procedure, with signatures and accountable officials.

The second gate is the FIFA Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes, which allow a player to represent the federation where a biological grandparent was born. That criterion has existed for decades. It does not demand indigenous blood, only an ancestral birthplace.

For Indonesia, that unlocked a historical resource. The community of European-descended people who remained in the Dutch East Indies after the colonial era, commonly called blijvers, left behind a generation of descendants holding Dutch passports, trained in European football, whose grandparents were born on what is now Indonesian territory. Beyond Paes and Romeny, the list includes names such as Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk and Kevin Diks.

PSSI is not buying players. PSSI is buying back time.

Why those two positions exactly

In football, not every position carries equal leverage. A good full-back improves one flank. A good central midfielder improves the tempo. Goalkeeper and centre-forward are the two positions where a single individual can swing an entire result. Paes and Romeny sit in exactly those two slots.

For a national team, where the back line assembles for only a few days per FIFA window, low familiarity is a built-in feature rather than anyone's fault. A stable number-one goalkeeper reduces the variance in the most fragile unit. At the other end, a centre-forward who knows how to score solves the problem Southeast Asian sides suffer most: creating chances without converting them.

Based on my experience following matches across European leagues and the J.League, the cost for a Southeast Asian national team to develop a continental-standard goalkeeper from scratch usually runs eight to ten years. The cost of completing a naturalization file for a player who already meets that standard is far shorter. That is an economic calculation, not an emotional one.

Financially, this is a deal with no price. No transfer fee, no club wages to pay, no intermediary payment between two boardrooms. The real cost is administrative, political and reputational. Those items never appear on a balance sheet, but they exist, and they are not unlimited.

What deserves credit on the operational side is that PSSI passed through two separate legal systems for the same group of players, covering House approval and FIFA clearance. Both files closed within less than twelve months. That organisational capacity is what regional rivals should be watching, more than the two players' names.

But the blijvers community is a historical population that has already closed. No new generations are being born in the Dutch East Indies. The supply of players qualifying through the grandparent-birthplace criterion will thin over time. A strategy resting on a non-renewable resource can only ever be a short- and medium-term strategy. When the stadium empties, the paperwork starts telling the truth.

The counter-intuitive angle

Indonesian media uses the phrase "legal loophole". That description is technically wrong. The grandparent-birthplace criterion is a clause FIFA designed deliberately, not a system error. It exists precisely to handle this group of people.

The decisive point is eligibility, not ancestry. Eligible and indigenous are two different concepts. They get blended together in public debate, and that blending is the real risk, not the files of Paes or Romeny.

A second risk few mention. Every naturalization slot is a slot taken away from a player developed in a domestic academy. If PSSI treats naturalization as a substitute for youth-development investment, then Indonesia grows stronger over the next two years and pays the price over the next ten. Naturalization should be a layer on top of a foundation, not the foundation itself.

For Vietnam, this is a direct competitive signal. French colonial heritage did not produce a football diaspora as deep as the Dutch East Indies case. Vietnam's resources lie in its development system and squad cohesion, a slower but more durable path. But if the Philippines and Malaysia chase the same model, Southeast Asia will enter a race in which any single nation's advantage gets diluted.

What to track

Rumour is only the starting point; the clause is the destination. What matters over the next twelve months sits in three data points: the number of new naturalization files approved by Indonesia's House of Representatives, any FIFA movement on the grandparent criterion, and how the Vietnam Football Federation responds in its call-up lists.

Old footage does not lie; only the hasty viewer misreads it. And no clause is meaningless, only skimmed.