Paes, Romeny and the Most Expensive Zero-Fee Deal in Southeast Asia

On 8 February 2026, in Jakarta, Ole Romeny placed his hand on the book and took the oath of Indonesian citizenship. In another time zone, Maarten Paes' file had already been closed since August 2026, when FIFA approved the federation transfer request of the goalkeeper born in 2026. No transfer fee was disclosed. No unveiling was staged in the manner of a marquee signing. No figure was large enough to reach the front pages of European newspapers.

Yet within two years, those two administrative documents shifted the balance of power in Southeast Asia more than any deal I have tracked in over a decade. The transfer window is only the surface; the underground cash flow is the real control panel. Here, the underground flow does not run through any club's bank account. It runs through a federation's meeting rooms, through administrative files, through lobbying efforts that lasted months and left no minutes behind.

I have followed football in this region since 2026, when I was writing for Bong Da newspaper and serving as a Madrid-based correspondent for World Sports newspaper. Back then, a Southeast Asian national team shirt was almost always tied to birthplace. Where a player was born, where he grew up, that was the flag he wore. Four decades later, I sit down with match footage and find myself adding a new column to my notebook: the passport column.

Context: when Southeast Asia shifts from development to import

To understand why the Paes and Romeny cases matter, you have to look at the competitive structure of Southeast Asian football in the current cycle.

For twenty years, this region operated on an almost uniform logic: domestic youth development first, with national team results as the yardstick. Vietnam followed that model and reaped clear results at youth level in the 2010s. Thailand did the same, with an academy system tied tightly to its domestic league. The Philippines was the earliest exception, calling overseas-based players of Filipino descent from the early 2000s, but they lacked something Indonesia now possesses: a historical diaspora large enough to be exploited at industrial scale.

That is the key point most regional commentary skips. Indonesia did not invent naturalisation. It is simply mining a demographic seam that no other country in the region has at the same density.

When the Dutch East Indies still existed, a segment of Dutch and mixed-heritage Europeans settled permanently across the archipelago. They were known as blijvers, those who stayed. Their descendants hold Dutch passports, grow up inside the Dutch football system, and still have grandparents born on what is now Indonesian territory. Under current football law, that ancestral trail is an exploitable asset.

I had seen this mechanism operate at smaller scale in European youth competitions. But only when Indonesia began deploying it at volume did I grasp the speed. In less than two years, alongside Paes and Romeny, other cases from the same diaspora group followed. This is no longer a handful of isolated cases. This is an assembly line.

The two legal gates and how they were opened

Before going deeper, one thing must be stated plainly: both players are eligible. There is no sign of any violation in their files. But to understand why they are eligible, the two gates must be separated.

The first gate is Indonesian citizenship law. Under Law No. 12/2026, particularly Article 20, the state may grant citizenship to a foreign national in the national interest, and this requires approval by Indonesia's House of Representatives. This is a deliberate mechanism, not a technical loophole. It allows the state to select people based on expected contribution, regardless of ethnic origin.

The second gate is FIFA's regulation. The Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes allow a player to represent a federation if a biological parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory. This criterion does not require indigenous blood. It requires biological geography.

The crux is this: eligibility and indigenous descent are two entirely separate concepts, and no FIFA text obliges them to overlap.

With Paes, the file was one notch more complex. Born in 2026, he had represented the Netherlands at U21 level, meaning he had already played for another federation at youth level. That left only one route: a change of association, a procedure permitted once in a career and subject to separate FIFA approval. That file cleared in August 2026. Based on what I have gathered from the Indonesian side, the federation pursued the Paes case persistently over a long period, not a matter of weeks.

With Romeny, the path was simpler: naturalise first, then register with FIFA. He took the oath in February 2026.

The real cost of a fee-free deal

This is the part financial analysts usually skip when discussing naturalisation.

From a transfer market standpoint, this is a zero-fee deal. No club pays anything. No release clause is triggered. No agent commission is recorded. If you only read European club balance sheets, you will find no trace of this transaction.

But a cost always exists; it is simply paid in a different currency.

The first is administrative and legal cost. A naturalisation file pursued on national-interest grounds must pass through parliament, through relevant ministries, through the judicial system. Every step consumes state machinery time. For a federation competing for every qualifying slot, time is money.

The second is political capital. Indonesia's football association publicly staked its credibility on this policy. If results do not arrive, what is lost is not a sum of money but the standing of an entire leadership.

The third, and the most expensive one few people count, is the opportunity cost to the domestic youth system. When a national team slot goes to a naturalised player, a player raised in a domestic academy does not get that slot. In a football nation whose academy resources are already thin, this substitution effect compounds year after year.

I do not oppose naturalisation as a tool. I oppose treating it as free.

Why the positions of these two players matter so much

There is one technical detail I consider more important than the legal story, and it lies in where these two play.

At national team level, preparation windows are extremely short. A national team may gather seven to ten days before an official match. Under those conditions, cohesion across lines cannot be built from scratch. The value of a national team player therefore lies not only in individual ability but in the capacity to reduce systemic risk.

Goalkeeper and centre-forward are the two highest-leverage positions in football. A stable goalkeeper shapes how the entire back line plays. A stable centre-forward shapes how the entire team attacks. If you had to pick two positions to naturalise, those are the two. Indonesia picked exactly those two.

Maarten Paes was born in 2026, is entering the mature phase of a goalkeeper's career, and the shelf life of an elite goalkeeper extends further than almost any other position on the pitch.

This is where I believe Indonesia's leadership calculated correctly and calculated ahead. A 27-year-old goalkeeper can serve a national team for seven or eight more years. That is not a short-term contract.

Conversely, this is also the weak point. If Paes is injured or loses form, the entire defensive structure built around him wobbles. The same applies to Romeny up front. This is single-point concentration risk, and I have seen no sign that Indonesia has prepared a proportionate contingency.

Execution at management level: the brightest part of the whole story

When assessing a football federation, I always separate two questions. One, is the strategy right. Two, can they execute it.

For Indonesia, the answer to the second question is plainly yes.

Getting a player through one nation's citizenship law is hard. Getting him through FIFA's regulations as well is harder. Doing it twice, with two legally distinct files, within two years, is a notable operational achievement. Paes needed a federation transfer. Romeny only needed naturalisation. Two different processes, one outcome.

I have watched many federations in this region announce naturalisation plans for years without completing a single file. Indonesia completing two in succession shows a bureaucracy that knows its work, not merely one with willpower.

But that is also where I began asking a different question.

The counter-intuitive angle: a seam that is running dry

This is the part I want to spend the most time on, because it is the biggest blind spot in the whole story.

Look at the nature of the resource Indonesia is mining. It is not a renewable talent seam. It is a historical population of finite size.

The Dutch settler community in the Indies is no longer being born. The Dutch East Indies ended in the middle of the last century. Which means that, decade by decade, the generation with grandparents born on Indonesian territory grows thinner. Every file approved today is one fewer file available tomorrow.

This is the fundamental difference between the Indonesian naturalisation model and a youth development model. Academies can produce generation after generation. A diaspora seam cannot.

People ask me who will rise this year. The correct question is: who has quietly gone silent on the balance sheet. For Indonesia, the correct question is not how many naturalised players they will call up next window, but what they will do when eligible files number only a handful per year.

At that point, if the domestic academy system has not been invested in alongside, Indonesia loses at both ends. They will no longer have naturalised players of sufficient quality to plug gaps, and they will not have a good enough domestic crop to replace them.

I have witnessed a similar class of error in another context. When the pandemic shut stadiums in 2026, I re-read the entire way the market operates and realised we had long misunderstood what a club's real asset is. Many clubs lived on short-term cash flow and called it strength. Naturalisation can become exactly that kind of short-term cash flow if it is not paired with a long-term plan.

There is one more point where Indonesian media is assigning the wrong weight. The language the country's press uses is exceptional case and legal loophole. That is an opinion framing, not a legal conclusion. The grandparent birthplace criterion is a deliberately designed provision in FIFA's regulations, existing precisely to handle diaspora and migration scenarios. Calling it a loophole is like calling tax law a loophole because it permits deductions.

The real risk here is not legal. It is reputational. If the no-indigenous-blood narrative keeps being framed that way, domestic public pressure will rise, even when every document is valid. And that pressure could force the federation to slow down exactly when it needs to accelerate.

Regional consequences: a race Vietnam must recalculate

For Vietnam's national team, this is not distant news. It is a direct competitive signal.

If Indonesia can keep adding players developed in Europe's top divisions, their short-term ceiling will sit above their own historical baseline. That narrows the gap with Vietnam, and at certain moments reverses it.

Vietnam's resource base is different in kind. The overseas Vietnamese community has scale, but the share of players properly developed in Europe's top divisions is far lower than the Dutch diaspora group in Indonesia. In other words, we do not have that seam at that density.

The more feasible path for Vietnam is to compete on what naturalisation cannot buy: cohesion and the stability of a player-producing system. That is a slow advantage, but a durable one.

Still, I would not be surprised if, within a few years, pressure from the Indonesian story forces Vietnam's federation to review its overseas-Vietnamese shortlist more seriously.

And it is worth looking wider. The Philippines and Malaysia have used naturalisation at varying intensities. If Indonesia succeeds, other regional federations will copy. When many nations do the same thing, each one's advantage shrinks. It becomes a race no one truly wins, only those who fall behind.

Since the 2026 data rebellion, I stopped trusting numbers and started trusting how they are placed next to each other. Here too. The count of naturalised players says little. What says much is the positions they play, their age at naturalisation, and the number of years they can serve.

What to track from here

There are four signals I will enter into my watch notebook over the next six to eight months.

First, how many naturalised names appear in Indonesia's next squad list, and how many of them start. That number reveals whether naturalisation is a supplementary solution or has become the spine.

Second, Indonesian public reaction after each major match. Win, and the debate quiets. Lose, and it flares up, aimed at naturalised players first. This is the kind of risk that cannot be insured.

Third, any change in how FIFA interprets the grandparent birthplace criterion. A technical workshop, a new guidance document, could narrow the path Indonesia is walking.

Fourth, and most important in the long run, signs of genuine investment in domestic academies. If money flows only into naturalisation files and not into youth training grounds, Indonesia's current success is a loan, not income.

Contracts do not create eras; eras create contracts. Paes and Romeny will be names discussed in this region for years. But the real question Southeast Asian football must answer is not how good they are. It is who walks through that door after them, and how long the door stays open.