Maarten Paes, Ole Romeny, and How Indonesia Rebuilt Its Spine Through the Rulebook

On the day Ole Romeny placed his hand on the flag and took the oath in Jakarta, I was sitting two hours' flight away, in Kuala Lumpur, rewinding a tape from last season. Talking about the ceremony is easy. The harder question sits elsewhere: if a national team may only bring in two men, which two positions should it choose?

Goalkeeper. And centre-forward.

Those two positions rarely make the prettiest transfer headlines. But they are the two spots where one individual can drag the entire system towards him, or drag it down. Indonesia filled exactly those two spots: Maarten Paes, born in 2026, goalkeeper; Ole Romeny, forward. Now is the time to measure, not to celebrate — to measure how many metres that spine shifts on the grass.

Every tactical diagram is a lie when you watch from the stands; the truth lies on the pitch, where the gaps move.

The two doors Paes and Romeny had to walk through

The legal story needs stating clearly, because most of the debate blends two different things. The first door is Indonesian citizenship law — Law No. 12 of 2026, Article 20, which allows naturalisation on state-interest grounds with approval from the House of Representatives, the DPR. The second door is FIFA's eligibility regulation, specifically the criterion of a biological grandparent born on the federation's territory. Paes and Romeny walked through both.

Paes is the more delicate case. He has played for the Netherlands at Under-21 level, so beyond citizenship he needed one more thing: a change of association. FIFA approved that in August 2026. Romeny took the shorter route, completing his citizenship in February 2026. Both have grandparents born in the Dutch East Indies, the territory that is Indonesia today.

What Indonesian media calls an exceptional case is not exceptional at all. A grandparent born on the territory is a FIFA criterion designed to be used; it does not exist as a system bug to be exploited. Eligibility and indigenous ancestry are two separate categories, and the rules only care about the first.

I understand why the story has been pushed. It carries a layer of history: the European-descended Dutch community that stayed in the Indies — the blijvers — left behind a pool of descendants born on Indonesian soil but wholly European by blood. That pool is real, traceable, and most importantly finite.

What the spine can actually change

Back to the grass. A goalkeeper does not score, but he decides where the back four stands. If a keeper is willing to leave his line by fifteen metres to sweep behind the defence, that defence is allowed to push higher. Pushing higher means the distance between midfield and defence shrinks, which means opponents get less time on the ball in the middle third.

Gaps. Always gaps. I measure matches by the distance between two centre-backs, between centre-back and holding midfielder, between full-back and touchline. At national-team level those distances are usually wider than at club level, because the players train together only a few days per window. A good goalkeeper covers exactly that kind of error: he is the one who talks, who pushes, who decides whether the defensive line sits high or deep in each phase.

The night Croatia dropped all the jargon, I kept one thing: the question before every phase. Before Romeny receives on the edge of the box, the question is: will he push the opposing defence back, or drop himself to act as a wall? Those two choices lead to two entirely different matches, and no diagram can answer on his behalf.

A striker who can hold the ball with his back to goal can turn a team that cannot circulate possession into a team that can play direct. He does not need many touches. He only needs to stand in the right place so that two centre-backs dare not step up.

Before the ball is circulated, I have already seen three decoy receivers and one true path. For Indonesia, the true path lies elsewhere: if Paes can keep the ball at his feet, the whole team is permitted to stand ten metres higher than when the keeper has to launch it long. Those ten metres never show up on the scoresheet, but they decide which team has to run.

Back when I spent three weeks counting every pressing action of Johor Darul Ta'zim, I recorded one metric: an average PPDA of 14.2, meaning opponents were allowed fourteen passes before each active defensive action. That number does not say whether Johor were strong or weak. It only says how Johor pressed. For this Indonesia, I have no equivalent number yet, and that is precisely the point: every claim that the team is stronger remains a claim, not a measurement.

Covid took away the stands, but it gave me back a formula for measuring home advantage without ears. Since then I always ask about the environment before I ask about tactics. The temperature in Jakarta, the pitch in Surabaya, the flight hours of a player travelling from the Netherlands to Southeast Asia — all of it belongs in the calculation. Distance covered and sprint counts are routinely packaged as effort metrics, but running a lot in the wrong places still produces pretty, meaningless numbers.

Where this story gets misread

The phase I am waiting for is not a goal. It is the phase where Romeny loses the ball in midfield and Indonesia have to run back, or the phase where Paes must decide in half a second: come or stay. Those moments reveal whether these two belong to the system, or merely stand beside it.

Indonesia's biggest risk does not sit in a courtroom or at FIFA. It sits in the fact that the Indo-Dutch descendant pool is a well with a bottom. The grandparents of the next players must be born before a certain historical marker, and that marker recedes with every decade. This is a one-off model, not an evergreen strategy. When a federation builds a national team by importing players already finished in Europe, it spends on short-term results and borrows against the long term — a debt repaid in minutes taken from players developed at home.

I do not say that to judge. Indonesia are acting within the rules, and Southeast Asian football has long traded between results and identity. But if you are standing in Hanoi or Bangkok, this is a signal worth reading: the model is copyable. The Philippines went first, Malaysia are experimenting, and Thailand have similar options on the table. The ASEAN naturalisation race will devalue the very advantage of naturalisation for everyone.

One more misreading: the heaviest pressure on PSSI is reputational, not legal. Because these two are the most prominent stars, they carry a larger image load than their actual contribution. One poor match, one bad touch, and the identity story will fuse instantly with the performance story.

What to watch in the next match

A match does not truly begin when the referee blows his whistle, but when a defender decides to leave his position. With Indonesia, I will watch one detail in the next fixture: the average position of the back line measured from goal. If it sits five to eight metres higher than the old baseline, Paes has created real value through something that never appears on the scoresheet. If it stays deep, the passport has changed the name of the man in goal, not the way the team plays.

For those working in Vietnamese football, the question does not revolve around whether Indonesia have improved. The question is: when a rival in the same region chooses to buy back time, what do you answer with — an academy that moves slower, or a diaspora list you have never compiled?