Passports and Touchlines: How Indonesia Rebuilt a National Team From a Colonial Archive

An Evening in Jeddah

On 5 September 2026, at King Abdullah Sports City in Jeddah, Salem Al-Dawsari placed the ball on the penalty spot. Maarten Paes stood on his line, both arms down, no bouncing, no clapping, no shouting at his team-mates. The man who scored against Argentina at the 2026 World Cup took his run-up. The ball travelled toward the right corner. Paes dived, his fingertips touched it, and Indonesia's match against Saudi Arabia ended 1-1.

In Manchester I watched that game at nearly one in the morning, my black notebook open on a blank page. I have a habit of recording detail before I record the score, and that night I wrote two words: goalkeeper. I remember the colour of the grass from that night before I remember the score. Only much later, reading back, did I understand why my pen stopped exactly there.

Six months later, on 25 March 2026, at Gelora Bung Karno, a 24-year-old forward named Ole Romeny scored the only goal in Indonesia's 1-0 win over Bahrain. Another small moment, swallowed again among hundreds of short news items that day. But placed side by side, the two details form a straight line: Indonesia had just filled the two positions with the greatest leverage on a football pitch — goalkeeper and centre-forward — with two players born in Europe, holding Indonesian passports, and carrying not a single drop of indigenous blood.

That is the core of the story the Indonesian press calls an "exceptional case". Understanding it, though, requires going against our reading habits.

Context: a federation changes strategy

In the history of Southeast Asian football, Indonesia has never lacked supporters. They lacked something else: a structure dense enough to convert passion into results. The 2000s and 2010s were a sequence of disappointments at AFF Cup tournaments, early eliminations, internal federation crises, and a domestic league repeatedly interrupted by governance disputes.

The turning point arrived with a change in the PSSI presidency. From 2026, PSSI shifted toward a far clearer strategy than in earlier periods: instead of waiting for a domestic golden generation, they actively went looking for Indonesians abroad. The first wave included Jordi Amat, Sandy Walsh and Shayne Pattynama. The second wave was stronger, with Jay Idzes, Calvin Verdonk, Thom Haye, Ragnar Oratmangoen, then Mees Hilgers, Eliano Reijnders and Joey Pelupessy. By the time of Paes and Romeny, the list had grown long enough that it was no longer an exception. It was a policy.

Based on my experience covering matches in Southeast Asia, the notable thing is not the quantity. It is the position. A federation that wants quick results usually naturalises in midfield or on the flanks, where a player integrates easily and attracts less scrutiny. Indonesia went straight for the spine.

For Vietnam, this is a direct concern. For more than a decade Vietnam built its regional standing on a very different model: academies, youth pipelines, U23 cohorts promoted to the senior team along a defined path, and a domestic league that is relatively stable in organisational terms. The return was the 2026 AFF Cup title, the 2026 AFC U23 Asian Cup final, and a first-ever appearance in the third round of World Cup qualifying for 2026. That model is slow but long in range.

When Indonesia changed its axis, the regional balance had to be recalculated.

Two doors, and a loophole that does not exist

Indonesian media describe these cases in the language of discovery: two leading national-team stars carry no indigenous bloodline, and they passed through a "legal loophole". The phrasing has pull, but it places the emphasis in the wrong spot.

Paes and Romeny did not step through a gap. They stepped through the very door Indonesian law and FIFA regulations were designed to open — it is just that very few supporters had ever read the blueprint before these two names appeared on a pitch.

The first door belongs to the state. Indonesia's Citizenship Law No. 12 of 2026, at Article 20, permits naturalisation in the national interest, subject to approval by the House of Representatives (DPR). This is a deliberate administrative mechanism, not a grey area. It allows the state to select individuals and legitimise that selection through a political decision. Both the Paes and Romeny cases passed through this process.

The second door belongs to football. The FIFA Regulations Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes (RGAS) allow a player to represent a federation if a biological parent or grandparent was born on that federation's territory. The provision does not mention ethnicity, skin colour, or percentage of bloodline. It mentions only the birthplace of a direct ancestor.

For Paes, the story is one degree more complex. Born in 2026, he represented the Netherlands at U21 level, meaning he had already played for another federation at youth level. To switch to Indonesia he needed a separate procedure: a change of association, approved by FIFA in August 2026. That kind of procedure can only be used once in a career, and it is the true bottleneck of the entire model.

For Romeny, the route was cleaner: he took the citizenship oath in February 2026 and was on the pitch in the March window.

The decisive point sits in one short sentence: eligibility is not the same as indigenous bloodline. Those two concepts are conflated in almost every commentary I have read, including in major newsrooms.

The vertical spine and the value of the margins

There is a technical reason these two choices deserve more analysis than their surface suggests.

In football, a player's value lies not only in ability but in influence per touch. Goalkeeper and centre-forward are the two highest-leverage positions in a squad. A good goalkeeper does not merely prevent goals; he reshapes the behaviour of the entire defensive line in front of him — when to push up, when to drop, when to commit a tactical foul. A good centre-forward does not merely score; he forces the opposition to stretch its defensive block, opening space for the lines behind.

For a national team, where players train together for only a few days per window, stability in these two positions matters more than at club level. An international back line that changes personnel constantly, lacking time to understand one another, depends heavily on a goalkeeper who can organise and who can talk. Paes, at 27, is entering the peak phase of a goalkeeper's career, and that phase often lasts another eight to ten years.

Further forward, Romeny represents exactly what Indonesia has lacked for two decades: a centre-forward able to operate at European tempo. In many Indonesia matches I have followed, the problem was not chance creation. The problem was the finisher. Balls travelled into the box and bounced out, and the match drifted away.

Read that way, two signings with no transfer fee filled the two holes with the highest cost of repair.

The economics of a deal with no price

This is the point football finance analysts usually skip, and the point I consider most important.

A naturalised player costs no transfer fee. No negotiation with a parent club, no sell-on clause, no percentage agent commission. Seen from a federation's balance sheet, this is an almost free acquisition of an asset.

But the cost exists; it simply does not sit in cash flow. It sits in administrative and political capital. A naturalisation file in the national interest must pass through parliament, through document verification steps, and through sustained public pressure throughout the process. For Paes there was an extra layer: convincing FIFA to approve the change of association, a procedure PSSI pursued over a long period and which does not always succeed.

Translated into the transfer market, these two deals — a goalkeeper entering his peak and a rising centre-forward — would carry a very high price. Indonesia did not pay that. They paid in time, in relationships, and in the political credibility of the federation.

This approach carries one consequence I wrote about in a piece on representation contracts some years ago: when a player joins with no fee behind him, he does not carry the market's financial expectations. He carries expectations of honour. For some people that pressure is lighter. For others it is far heavier, because no contract shields them from the question "why are you here".

A finite heritage stock

This is the part I believe is most underrated in the whole story.

The Dutch East Indies was the name of the territory that is now Indonesia under colonial rule. Across several generations there existed a population of European descent born and raised there, alongside a substantial Eurasian community. After Indonesian independence, and through the 1950s, most of them emigrated to the Netherlands. Their descendants today hold Dutch nationality, speak Dutch, and play football inside European systems.

That is why Paes and Romeny have grandparents born on the territory of present-day Indonesia — even though they themselves, their parents, and in many cases their grandparents carry no indigenous bloodline at all.

This creates an excellent recruitment pool. It also creates an absolute limit.

This supply is a closed historical population. No new generation is being born inside it, because the condition that produced it — a colonial administration on East Indies soil — disappeared nearly eighty years ago.

Every player recruited is a portion of that reserve withdrawn permanently. The most suitable individuals — old enough, good enough, with the right documents, and most importantly willing to give up a European nationality — are always the smallest group inside an already small group.

That is why this model can work very quickly over three to five years, but cannot be the foundation of twenty.

In a 2026 piece about young players training alone through the pandemic, I wrote a line I still reuse: behind every contract is a child who grew up inside a stadium. That is true on both sides. Indonesia is signing contracts with no fee, and behind each one is an eighteen-year-old at some domestic academy who has just lost a place in a squad he never knew he was competing for.

The Southeast Asian race

Indonesia is not alone in this.

The Philippines has pursued the diaspora route for more than two decades, with players born in Europe carrying Filipino heritage through a parent. Malaysia has pushed on two fronts in recent years: naturalising players long established in the domestic league, and searching for mixed-heritage players of Malaysian descent in Europe. Thailand has used Europe-raised players at AFF Cup tournaments. Singapore has done this for a very long time.

What Indonesia brings that differs is the scale of the supply. Because of its specific colonial history, it holds a diaspora community in the Netherlands far larger than anything its neighbours can mobilise. The Indonesian-origin population in the Netherlands is among the largest historical diaspora communities in Europe, and football is the most popular sport at both ends of that community.

Seen from Vietnam, this is a structural advantage. Vietnam has diaspora communities in France, in Eastern Europe, in North America — but not a massive second- or third-generation population born in a country with a top-tier European football system, speaking the same football language, and with grandparents born on Vietnamese territory during the colonial period.

Put another way: Indonesia can play this game at a different level, purely because of history.

But there is a paradox here that I consider the brightest point of the whole subject.

A contrarian angle: Vietnam is doing the same thing, more quietly

This is where I want to stand where few stand.

On regional forums and in commentary, Vietnam and Indonesia are usually placed at opposite poles: one a patient domestic-development model, the other a fast-track naturalisation model. The framing sounds neat, and it fails at one important point.

Vietnam has been doing both.

Nguyen Xuan Son, a Brazilian-born forward, acquired Vietnamese citizenship and became a cornerstone of the national team during the 2026 AFF Cup campaign, before suffering a serious injury in the final. Filip Nguyen, a Czech-born goalkeeper, completed his citizenship process and was called up during Philippe Troussier's tenure. Jason Pendant Quang Vinh, a defender born in France, followed a similar route in a more recent period. These three cases differ in origin and mechanism, but sit inside one logic: direct reinforcement of the national team with players who matured inside foreign systems.

The difference between the two countries lies in two places.

First, the criterion. Xuan Son's case went through naturalisation based on residency, accompanied by public discussion of the legal and ethical dimensions. The Paes and Romeny cases went through the grandparent birthplace criterion — one FIFA accepts as an official rule, requiring no residency period and no indigenous bloodline.

Second, the instrument. Vietnam handles cases individually, in waves, according to squad needs. Indonesia has built a systematic process: organised, list-driven, with a state-level persuasion mechanism behind it.

Seen that way, the two countries are at different stages of the same road, rather than on two different roads. One has industrialised. The other is still working by hand.

And that raises a difficult question for the whole region: if the grandparent birthplace criterion is valid for FIFA, then the debate about national-team "identity" no longer sits on legal ground. It sits on emotional ground.

The submerged part of a news story

Indonesian media cover these two cases in a forensic tone. They ask whether these players truly belong to the national team. That way of asking creates a different kind of pressure from professional pressure.

Here I want to say something about my own work, because it connects directly.

In January 2026 I published an exclusive on James Garner being loaned by Manchester United to Nottingham Forest, exactly forty-eight hours before the club confirmed it officially. I spent seventy-two hours verifying across three independent sources, and during those three days I called an agent at two in the morning three times. That story reached 1.2 million reads. But the part nobody sees is the process: logging sources, cross-checking, eliminating hypotheses, and accepting the risk of being wrong. I still keep that rule: an exclusive is only the tip; the submerged part is the phone calls at midnight.

In the Indonesian case, that submerged part is the paperwork. A citizenship oath in February 2026. A change-of-association approval in August 2026. A parliamentary ratification. A birth certificate belonging to a grandfather in a town in the former East Indies, perhaps with faded ink.

None of that appears on a front page. Yet the entire legal existence of a national-team goalkeeper depends on it.

And here is a thought I kept to myself for months: when the public debates a national team's identity on the basis of bloodline, it inadvertently puts a question to exactly the part of sport that governing bodies deliberately wrote in technical language. The press tower is the highest place to look from, but not the closest place to understand from.

Where the real risk sits

Setting aside the identity debate, there are three structural risks worth attention.

First, single-point dependency. If Paes suffers a long-term injury, Indonesia's defence loses the organiser that every alternative has yet to be tested against at that level. If Romeny loses form, the attack returns to its starting point. A squad reinforced at two spine positions is very strong while the spine holds, and very fragile when it breaks.

Second, the closed nature of the supply. No new generation of diaspora is being born with grandparents on East Indies soil. Every player recruited shrinks the remaining group. Within a decade, the cost of searching for and persuading them will rise while the quality of the supply falls.

Third, and in my view most serious, reputational risk. It does not lie in the possibility of sanction, since the files were lawfully approved. It lies in the possibility of a stereotype forming.

If Indonesia loses a major match with a squad heavy in naturalised players, the story will no longer be a tactical story. It will become a story about "people who do not belong here". That is the kind of reaction no federation handles easily, because it cannot be answered with data.

In the opposite direction, if Indonesia succeeds, the pressure shifts to neighbouring federations. At that point the question is no longer whether to do it, but how fast it can be done.

What I consider most important, and it is not on the pitch

Across many years of following regional football, I have come to a conclusion I believe applies here more than to any other case.

The rhythm of a season is not in the goals; it is in every Saturday repeating. For a national team that rhythm is even slower: a few days of camp, a few months of waiting, a few years for one cycle. So what decides the success of a squad transformation is not the quality of each individual, but the capacity to turn individuals imported from four directions into a group with shared reflexes.

On that measure, Indonesia holds an advantage rarely mentioned: many of the naturalised players speak the same language, come from the same football culture, and have faced each other in European youth competitions. That group integrates with itself faster than a group drawn from four different countries. But it integrates more slowly with the rest of the squad.

The real question is not where they came from. The question is whether the dressing room accepts them, and that is answered only in matches with no cameras in the technical meeting room.

To write a true story, I have to stand where nobody stands. In this case, that place is the corridor of a training centre no reporter may enter, where a group of players speaking Dutch and a group speaking Indonesian are learning to call each other by name.

Signals to track

What can be read in the press is only the surface. The submerged part will surface over the next twelve to twenty-four months, and I will track four specific signals.

First, the next squad list. If PSSI announces another case from the Netherlands or Belgium, the model is running to plan. If several windows pass with none, the supply may be starting to dry up.

Second, FIFA's language. The regulations on eligibility are reviewed periodically, and if the naturalisation wave in Southeast Asia continues to grow, pressure to adjust the grandparent birthplace criterion will appear. This is a systemic risk no federation controls.

Third, Vietnam's response. If VFF accelerates its process for overseas Vietnamese-heritage players, or broadens its naturalisation scope, the regional balance shifts again. If VFF keeps its current model, it is betting on a slower but more durable strategy.

Fourth, and in my view decisive, the results of the highest-pressure matches. Not group-stage games. The matches where a goal conceded in the eighty-eighth minute reshapes an entire cycle.

A missed penalty in the eighty-eighth minute has little to do with technique; it is a matter of people who know exactly what they are standing there for. Indonesia has paid a great deal of administrative cost to have such people in those positions. The remaining question, answerable only on the pitch: can a player defend a shirt he has worn for only a few months.

I will keep my black notebook open at that page. And I will not write the score first.

An empty stadium is a heartbeat learning to beat again — and so is a national team being built out of passports.