The Passport Trial in Jakarta: Indonesia Borrows Colonial History to Pay Its ASEAN Debt

Jakarta, February 2026. Ole Romeny recites the naturalization oath before Indonesia's House of Representatives. No camera captures his hand up close. Six months earlier, in Zurich, another signature was set down: FIFA approved the federation transfer of Maarten Paes, a goalkeeper who once played for the Netherlands U21. Two procedures, two legal systems, one result. Both men are now Indonesian citizens on paper, pillars of the Indonesian national team on the pitch, and carry not a single drop of indigenous blood.

Indonesian media called it an "exceptional case". A few outlets went further and used the phrase "legal loophole". I read those lines one morning in Busan and asked myself: if this is a loophole, who drilled it, and in which year? A loophole does not create itself. It is a door with a designer, a surveyor, and someone who fitted the hinges. The right question is not "is there a loophole" but "who opened the door, and for whom".

That is why I sat down to write this piece. Not to retell a naturalization story, but to open a trial. At 66, I no longer chase breaking news; I sit and let breaking news come to me. And this story reached me from an angle most Southeast Asian media are looking at from the wrong side.

Context: Southeast Asia is changing how it buys strength

To understand the Jakarta affair, place it on the map. Southeast Asian football has run on a fairly stable order for two decades. Vietnam and Thailand split the regional top spot via different routes: Thailand relies on a dense domestic league and a pipeline of small, technically trained players; Vietnam relies on disciplined youth academies plus a golden generation that grew up together. Both are self-production models.

Indonesia took another road. For over a decade, football in the archipelago shuffled between ambition and reality: the largest population in the region, the most fervent fan base, yet national-team results chronically out of phase with potential. Then the leadership of the Indonesian football federation pivoted. Instead of waiting for a domestic golden generation, they chose to shorten the timeline using resources already available in Europe.

Those resources are not on the transfer market. They sit in the civil registry. The Dutch East Indies left behind a long-term settler community known as blijvers — those who stayed rather than returned. Their descendants today hold Dutch passports, grew up inside the Dutch football system, and carry one golden line in their files: a grandparent born on Indonesian territory. That line is an asset.

To someone in my trade, this deserves to be called a discovery. The transfer market is a play, and I sit in a row the actors do not know about. But this affair does not happen in the market. It happens in registry offices, in parliamentary corridors, in two a.m. calls between Jakarta and Amsterdam. To try it, you must read two bodies of law at once: Indonesian citizenship law and FIFA's player eligibility regulations.

Two doors, not one

A common mistake in regional media is to compress everything into one vague concept: "naturalization". Naturalization is only the first door. There is a second, far harder one, and most fans do not know it exists.

The first door is citizenship law. Indonesia applies naturalization in the national interest under Article 20 of Law No. 12 of 2026. The key is discretion: the state may grant citizenship to whomever it deems necessary, without the applicant having to prove indigenous descent. The process passes through the House of Representatives. Both Paes and Romeny went through exactly this door, with DPR approval. Procedurally, the files are clean.

The second door is FIFA's eligibility regime, contained in the Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes. It allows a player to represent a national team if a biological parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory. This is the substantial-connection criterion. The grandparents of Paes and Romeny were born in the Dutch East Indies. That is sufficient.

Let me stress a point Indonesian media keeps blurring: eligibility to wear a national shirt does not mean possessing indigenous blood. These are two entirely separate categories, merged into one because it makes a convenient headline. FIFA does not write rules on the concept of ethnicity. FIFA writes rules on territory and first- or second-degree blood relation. A fully European-descended Dutchman whose grandfather was born in Batavia satisfies the criterion entirely, and that contradicts no line of the regulations.

So when a newspaper calls this a "loophole", I must say plainly: that word is the writer's opinion, not a legal fact. That door was designed to open. Indonesia simply stood in the right spot and pushed.

A contract has a signature, but the dark also has a signature of its own. In this affair, the dark signature is not in a transfer fee. It is in the non-monetary price: time, relationships, and political credibility.

The hard case: Maarten Paes and the federation-transfer mechanism

Of the two files, Paes's is far more complex, and this is where I want to pause longest.

Paes was born in 2026. He is not an unknown. He was called into Dutch youth teams, and he wore the Netherlands U21 shirt. For most players, one appearance in a youth national team is the end of every other dream. But FIFA has a separate mechanism: a one-time change of association. It allows a player who has represented one federation at youth level to switch to another, subject to conditions on caps, the age at which he played, and his connection to the new federation.

This is territory few journalists dare enter, because it requires reading the regulations line by line and cross-referencing a player's appearance history. I do not trust numbers; I trust the silence between two numbers. And the most telling silence here is the timing of Paes's U21 appearances.

If he played after exceeding the youth-age threshold, or if his cap count passed the limit, the transfer file closes. In practice the file opened, and FIFA approved it in August 2026. That means Indonesia's side prepared enough documentation to show Paes did not cross the locked threshold. But this is the kind of detail that sits at the very edge of the regulations, and I always advise readers to check it against the version of the rules currently in force. This is the kind of file where one misplaced dot can bring down the whole building.

An agent says three things: one true, one false, one to defend himself later. I have no agent in this file to cross-examine. But I have another fact: Indonesian media describe the federation as pursuing the Paes file persistently over a long period. Persistent, in this trade's language, does not mean waiting. It means spending money, spending relationships, spending time, and in all likelihood hiring a dedicated legal unit.

Let us name that expense correctly: an eligibility fee. Not a single dollar flowed to any club. But the real cost of this deal sits in lawyer invoices, in flights, in closed meetings with no minutes. On a federation's balance sheet, it lands under administrative costs. On the region's balance of power, it lands under strategic investment.

Why a goalkeeper and a striker

One detail ignored by most regional coverage: the positions of the two men chosen. Paes is a goalkeeper. Romeny is a centre-forward.

In football, these two positions carry the highest single-player leverage on results. A good goalkeeper can earn points in matches where the whole team is outplayed. A good centre-forward can turn a draw into a win in a single moment. The other positions on the pitch are largely accumulative: the more good players the better, but none of them alone changes the result. Goalkeepers and strikers do.

For a national team, where players get little shared training time, the value of these two positions rises further. A national back line is usually where the links have not yet learned each other, and a goalkeeper who knows how to command compensates for much of that loose cohesion. At the other end, a striker who knows how to finish solves the problem Southeast Asian teams meet most often: enough chances created, but nobody putting the ball in the net.

If I were asked which positions to naturalize first, my answer is exactly these two. And that is what catches my eye: Indonesia's leadership did not choose at random. They chose by leverage.

Here I must be blunt about the limits of the evidence. Indonesian media assert that the naturalization wave "raises the team's strength". I do not dispute the intuition. But that assertion comes with no number attached. No FIFA ranking points before and after. No qualifier results before and after. No comparison sample. Strength here is asserted, not measured. That is the first weak point in Indonesia's own file, and I will return to it at the end.

A non-renewable supply

Now to the part I consider most important, and also the part almost nobody discusses.

Indonesia's model runs on a specific supply: the colonial-era settler community and their descendants. This is a historical population, closed, and impossible to expand. Nobody can birth more grandparents.

Picture it as a mine. That mine has a fixed reserve. Every successful naturalization is one ore chunk taken out, and no chunk is ever put back. Paes and Romeny are two good chunks. But after them, the next batch will be thinner, and the batch after that thinner still, because Dutch-descended players with grandparents born in the Dutch East Indies and enough professional quality to play for a national team form a finite group, satisfying three conditions at once: bloodline, ability, and willingness.

The report I read mentions a string of other names in the same wave — defenders and midfielders of Dutch descent also in the pipeline. Note that. But note the consequence too: the more people mobilized early, the faster the mine drains.

Here the comparison with Vietnam becomes interesting. Vietnam has no large football diaspora of French descent to draw on. French colonial history left cultural, linguistic, and some expatriate traces, but it did not leave a line of Europe-level professional players thick enough for a federation to name. In other words, Vietnam has no comparable mine to work. That is a structural disadvantage, and one money cannot fix.

But it is also a structural blessing, in another sense. A country with no mine is forced to plant trees.

The blind spot: the hidden cost of a free deal

Now to the counterintuitive part, where I believe I see differently from the crowd.

Let us talk about the price that is not on the invoice.

Every national-team slot is finite. A squad has 23, 26 men. When two slots are taken by players raised in the European system, two other players raised in the Indonesian domestic league lose out. From a single match's view, the better player plays. Nothing to argue about.

But from a decade's view, the story differs. If the path to the national team is closed at one position, the investment incentive of an entire young generation at that position collapses. A 16-year-old goalkeeper in Surabaya, seeing ahead of him a goalkeeper raised in the Netherlands with a European contract, will recalculate. He may still train. But he will know that his path to the national team depends not only on whether he is better than the man beside him. It also depends on which passport he was born with.

This is a substitution cost, a kind that appears in no balance sheet and never in a short article. But it is real. And it accumulates.

I am not saying Indonesia is wrong to do this. In football, every federation has the right to use every legal tool to win. The game is the game. But once seated in the analyst's chair, I must say this model is trading a short-term asset for a long-term one, with no guarantee the exchange rate is favorable.

And here is the second, deeper counterintuitive point. Indonesian media are busy with the question "are Paes and Romeny Indonesian". To me, that is the wrong question. The right one is: after taking everything history left behind, what will Indonesia do in the next twenty years? A drained mine is a gift with an expiry date. An academy is not.

What evidence shows this is a plan, not an accident

I do not want this piece read as a conspiracy theory. So I must cross-examine myself: does the hypothesis "a deliberate plan" have evidence?

There are three pieces.

The first is sequence. The Paes file was processed and announced first. The Romeny file followed. Two cases, two years, two legal teams, one governing body. A single event is random. Two events in a row with the same structure is a process.

The second is position selection. If this were chance, we would see random positions: a full-back, a winger, a centre-back. But we see exactly the two highest-leverage positions. The probability of a random process producing exactly those two is low.

The third is the persistence Indonesian media themselves record. Persistence is goal-directed behavior. Nobody persists at something they do not want.

These three together are not enough to conclude absolutely. But my trade is comparing contracts with dark signatures, and in that trade, three pieces pointing one way usually justifies opening a file.

The cloud over Southeast Asia

Indonesia's story does not stand alone. The Philippines went earlier with a similar model built on expatriate and diaspora communities. Malaysia is looking. Thailand has its own files. Once one federation in the region proves the route is effective and legal, others will copy it. Not because they like it, but because they must.

This is the nature of an arms race in football. Nobody wants to run. But the one who runs first forces those behind to run too, or be left in the qualifiers.

A rumor never dies; it only changes hands to keep living. And here the rumor takes a new shape: no longer news of a player moving from club A to club B, but news of a player moving from one country to another by bloodline. The transfer market has opened a counter onto a new exchange floor, where the goods are not a left foot or pace, but a grandparent's birth certificate.

At 66, I have watched the transfer market change shape several times. I saw the era of billionaire owners. I saw the era of state investment funds. I saw the era of data models. And now I see the era of genealogists. The winner in the coming phase may not be the team with the best academy, but the team with the best civil registry.

That is a prospect worth stating, even if it sounds unfamiliar.

Where Vietnam stands in this picture

I carry two cultural citizenships: born in Japan, working in Korea. But the market I cover most is Southeast Asia, and within it, Vietnam is one of the two pillars I track closest. So I have an obligation to say this clearly.

Indonesia's move is a direct competitive signal to Vietnam. Not within a single match, but within a long race for regional standing. For years, Vietnam held its edge through a cohesive, well-coached generation that matured together across tournaments. That edge has a property: it cannot be copied quickly, but it cannot be broken quickly either. To overtake such a cohesive team, a rival must raise the ceiling of individual quality. And that is exactly what Indonesia is doing.

Vietnam's rational response is not to imitate the naturalization model, because Vietnam has no mine to work. The rational response is to accelerate where it is stronger: coaching, tactical discipline, and the continuity of a settled squad. In a race where a rival is borrowing time from history, the side that owns its own time usually wins at the final stage.

The emptiest summer taught me the fullest way of seeing. In 2026, when global football froze and I had to build simulation models to fight the boredom of the quarantine bubble, I learned something I carry to this day: when there is no match to watch, what remains is structure. Structure decides who wins over the next three years. And Indonesia's structure has a crack very few write about.

Three scenarios for the next two years

I always limit my simulations to three cases, because more than that is fooling myself with complexity.

The most likely scenario: Indonesia naturalizes three to four more Dutch-descended players across the next two transfer windows, uses that momentum to go deep in regional tournaments, and the pressure on Vietnam in qualifiers rises markedly. High probability, because the mechanism has proven workable and the political cost was paid once.

The first surprise scenario: a future file runs into a federation-transfer snag because a player exceeded the youth cap threshold, and the affair creates a bad precedent in Indonesian public opinion. Low probability, but not ignorable, as such files sit at the very edge of the rules.

The second surprise scenario: FIFA tightens its interpretation of the grandparent-born-on-territory criterion. Low probability in the short term, but if the naturalization wave spreads across many federations, pressure to amend the rules will grow. A small interpretive change is enough to shut an entire pipeline.

These three do not exclude each other. They can overlap, and in reality usually do.

What to watch from now on

I am not the one to advise any federation. My trade is observation and cross-checking. But I can state clearly what I will track.

First, Indonesia's next squad list. If the number of naturalized players rises and the number of domestic-league players falls, that is quantitative evidence for the substitution argument above.

Second, the Indonesian House of Representatives' announcements on new naturalization approvals. This is the earliest indicator of how fast the mine is being worked.

Third, any FIFA move regarding the eligibility criterion. One line in a legal text can be worth more than a hundred matches.

Fourth, and most important for Vietnamese readers: how Vietnam responds. If over the next two years Vietnam's youth teams keep steadily producing players good enough to play abroad, the structural race remains balanced. If that pace slows while Indonesia accelerates, the gap will open where nobody is looking until it is too late.

In place of a conclusion

I began with a room in Jakarta and two signatures. I end with a question I cannot yet answer.

If a country can borrow its colonial history to buy a stronger national team for ten years, whether that loan pays off will not be decided by those ten years. It will be decided by the twenty years after, when the gift is spent and there is nothing left to withdraw.

And if every country in the region copies that method, in the end nobody will plant trees. Only people standing around waiting for a mine.

I will sit in my row and keep cross-checking. Not to find a single conclusion, but to keep the door of the reversed hypothesis slightly ajar. That is the only way a 66-year-old in this trade can stay honest with his readers.