Passports Replacing Academies: Indonesia Purges Six Attackers Ahead of the 2026 ASEAN Cup

On September 18, 2026, PSSI published its 23-man Indonesia squad for the ASEAN Cup. I skimmed it the first time and thought it was ordinary. On the second reading, I stopped at a name that was not on the list. Eliano Reijnders. The name I had grown used to seeing in Indonesia call-ups was crossed out. Alongside him, five other attacking faces disappeared: Rafael Struick, Jens Raven, Mauro Zijlstra, Victor Dethan, Witan Sulaeman.

Six attacking players cut in a single announcement. Two new faces added: Dion Markx, defender at Persita Tangerang, and Luke Vickery, forward at Macarthur FC, recently naturalised as an Indonesian citizen. Only four recognised forwards remain in the 23-man squad.

I sat in Paris, reopened the list, and thought of a line I keep writing: "Every transfer window is a hunting season — the strong set the traps, the clever look for exits." There is no transfer window here. No fees, no contracts, no sell-on clauses, no agent commissions. And that is exactly why I care. When no money moves on the surface, you see most clearly where the money moved before. And in Indonesia, the money moved through a road few outside Southeast Asia are willing to look at directly: the passport.

Context: A Football Nation Rebuilding Itself with Paperwork

To understand why a 23-man list deserves dissection, place it in the correct frame. The ASEAN Cup — the Southeast Asian regional championship, formerly the AFF Championship and rebranded in 2026 — has become a stage Indonesia no longer treats as entertainment. This is a competition they once dominated, then endured a long period of being overtaken by Thailand and Vietnam. In the 2026-2026 cycle, they chose another road to reclaim their status: mass naturalisation.

I have tracked the Southeast Asian player market since after the 2026 World Cup, when I began applying a method of separating "real value" from "media value" to regional players. Not long ago, I wrote an analysis of the wave of Dutch-Indonesian and Belgian-Indonesian players. At the time, I estimated more than 200 players aged 18-30 with Indonesian ancestry were playing in European leagues from the third tier upward. That figure is not random. It is the result of migration history, of Dutch-Indonesian communities formed over the twentieth century, and of a European football academy system that accidentally became a talent factory for another country.

PSSI saw the opportunity. And they are not the only nation to do so. But they are the most aggressive, the most public, and the largest in scale.

What stands out is that the mechanism operates exactly like a transfer market — except without fees. When a club buys a player from South America, it pays a transfer fee, training compensation, agent commission, and wages. When a federation naturalises a player with ancestral ties, it pays — almost nothing. No transfer fee. No training compensation. No sell-on clause. The only costs are legal, travel, persuasion, and diplomatic opportunity cost. This is the highest-yield investment in modern football, and Indonesia is exploiting it at industrial scale.

In this 23-man list, if I count by birthplace and academy origin, at least half come from abroad or from European academies. This is not a national team in the traditional sense of the word. It is a national team in the sense of an investment fund: picking the best available assets wherever they can be reached, as long as the legal conditions are met.

And that is why I want to write about this list. Not because of the two debutants, but because of what those two debutants represent: a model of national-team construction that does not need a domestic academy at all.

Reading the 23-Man List Like a Balance Sheet

When I analyse a transfer, I never open with the player. I open with the list of owners. Who is short of money? Who has money to spare? Who needs a specific asset this season? The same applies here. Looking at the 23 names, the first question is not "is this squad strong or weak" but "by what logic was this squad assembled".

That logic shows most clearly in the attack.

Of the six omitted players, all are attackers or wide attackers. Eliano Reijnders is an attacking midfielder with a Dutch-system background. Rafael Struick is a forward once hyped in Europe. Jens Raven and Mauro Zijlstra are two of the young faces promoted in recent years. Victor Dethan is a wide attacker. Witan Sulaeman is a veteran with international experience. All vanished at once.

This cannot be random. When a coach drops one player, it is a personal decision. When he drops six players in the same functional position, it is a systemic decision. The new squad retains only two familiar attacking names: Ole Romeny and Ragnar Oratmangoen. Both play in Europe. Romeny is contracted to a Dutch club, Oratmangoen has played across multiple European leagues. Both are rated for physical foundation and pressing capacity above the regional average.

The two debutants added in this window have a different configuration. Dion Markx, defender at Persita Tangerang, is the most logically interesting case on the list. He was called up for "playing more minutes for Persita this season". This is what I call "minutes logic" — selection driven by actual club output, not caps or reputation. In European football, this is standard. In Southeast Asian football, it remains a shift in thinking.

Luke Vickery, forward at Macarthur FC in the A-League, is the second case. He has just been naturalised as an Indonesian citizen. Calling up an A-League forward into a squad with only four recognised forwards is a decision with a double meaning. On one hand, it shows the coach wants to test a forward profile different from what he has. On the other, it shows the naturalisation system is still operating, with no sign of slowing.

What I want to stress here is this: when you read a 23-man list, what matters is not who was chosen, but who was chosen to replace whom. Six attackers leave, two new faces arrive — one defender and one forward. The balance shifts clearly away from the creative attacking group toward players with stronger physical foundations and better off-ball pressing.

This is a sign of a player-archetype shift, not merely a personnel change. If I had to bet, I would bet on the hypothesis: the coach wants an attack that runs more, duels more, and depends less on individual brilliance. This is the attacking template suited to short tournaments, where fitness and organisation matter more than individual technique. But I cannot confirm this from available data, because the source article mentions no tactical system. This is inference at medium confidence.

The Four-Forward Problem in Eleven Days

The tournament runs from September 25 to October 5, 2026 — eleven days of competition. In that window, Indonesia play Group A against Singapore, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. By FIFA ranking, Indonesia are the highest-ranked side in the group. This is a favourable draw, and personally I think it is also a psychological trap.

The problem with a 23-man squad in eleven days is positional versatility. Four recognised forwards is a thin number. If one of the four is injured, the team must push a wide midfielder high, or convert a central midfielder into a false nine. This is a problem many Southeast Asian teams have faced, and the usual solution is to accept the risk.

I once wrote about a similar case in an analysis of Vietnam's squad at a regional tournament. When a team has only three genuine forwards in a short tournament, rotation capability is severely constrained, and tactics must adapt to fitness status rather than to the opponent. This is a type of risk I call "structural squad risk" — not caused by injuries, but by squad design from the outset.

Indonesia are placing themselves in that risk. With four forwards for eleven days, they have two options. Option one: trust that wide midfielders can score enough to compensate. Option two: trust that the defence is solid enough to win by not conceding. Both options have merit. But both mean that if the new attack does not gel, the team must rely on structure rather than individuals.

This is the point I want readers to note: when a national team clears out six attacking players and adds two defensive and pressing profiles, it is shifting itself from a "win with stars" model to a "win with system" model. The second model is harder to build, but when it succeeds, it is more durable.

The Naturalisation Pipeline: A Market with No Transfer Fees

Back to the central story: money flow. In European football, every transaction leaves an accounting trace. Transfer fees, agent commissions, wages, contract amortisation, instalment clauses. At national-team level, none of these numbers exist. But there is another economic structure operating, and it operates exactly like a parallel transfer system.

Imagine PSSI as a club with no academy. Instead of developing players from childhood, they wait for foreign academy systems to do that work, and the grown players then return to wear the national shirt through bloodline or residency. This is an economically optimal strategy. Training cost zero. Risk cost zero. Opportunity cost near zero.

But it is not entirely free. There are three hidden costs I always raise when analysing this strategy.

The first cost is political. When a national team has too many naturalised players, the identity question begins to surface. Not from the federation, but from the fans. This is a form of social cost that football administrators routinely underestimate, until results fail to arrive and pressure erupts.

The second cost is systemic. When a national team depends mainly on naturalised players, domestic academies lose their investment incentive. Why should a club spend money building an academy, knowing that the road to the national team is occupied by players from abroad? This is a long-term loss I call "pipeline loss".

The third cost is renegotiation. A naturalised player commits only once. After that, if he is not called up, he may lose interest. The six players dropped in this window are living proof of that cost. Among them are people who invested time and personal reputation in the Indonesia project. When they are dropped, that investment is not refunded.

Here I want to stress a point regional media rarely mention: Eliano Reijnders is not merely a dropped player. He is a high-market-value asset playing in Europe, and being dropped from the national squad will affect his negotiating position at club level in future. Not directly, but indirectly: a player with a national-team slot is usually priced higher than one without, even at equal form.

This sounds cold, but it is how the market works. And it is why being cut from a national list can create more pressure than a club defeat.

Fiction Boundary: What the Source Article Does Not Say

Before going further, I must pause on a methodological point. When I analyse a piece of information, I always run three layers of verification. The first is the financial source. The second is the intermediary source. The third is the club or federation record. If one of the three is missing, I do not conclude.

In this case, I must admit something: the source article I accessed has serious sourcing problems. Of the 25 information points I recorded, 24 carry no specific source. Only the announcement date (September 18) is attributed to PSSI. This is a very low level of verification — not low in the sense of false information, but low in the sense of not being independently verifiable.

Three specific problems must be raised, because they affect the confidence ceiling of every conclusion that follows.

The first is the head coach identity. The source article names a specific coach, but this conflicts with what I know about the 2026 cycle, when Indonesia were led by a different coach. A change in 2026 is possible, but I cannot confirm it from available documents. If the coach identity is wrong, the entire analysis of his selection philosophy collapses.

The second is the competition name. The Southeast Asian regional championship was rebranded from the AFF Championship to the ASEAN Championship in 2026. Prefixing "FIFA" to the name is a governance-level claim that cannot be confirmed from the source text. If true, it is a major change in commercial rights and registration standards. If false, it is a basic factual error.

The third is overall sourcing. With 96% of information unsourced, this article belongs to what I call "single-source aggregation". It may be correct. It may also be the product of an editorial process lacking verification. Either way, I cannot use it as evidence for high-confidence conclusions.

This is not professional scepticism. This is discipline. In eleven years of tracking the industry, I have learned that the costliest mistakes come not from misreading data, but from trusting unverified data. "A contract is only the final piece of paper in a long game of chess." And in this case, that paper has not even been signed.

Contrarian View: What No One Wants to Say About the Naturalisation System

Now to my favourite part of any analysis: the contrarian view. When people look at a national squad and see two debutants, they usually write about the future. I want to write about the past. More precisely, I want to write about what was removed so those two debutants could have a place.

In Indonesia, the naturalisation system is not merely a sporting strategy. It is a substitute for an incomplete development system. For years, Liga 1 has been praised as one of the most vibrant leagues in Southeast Asia. But when you look at the national squad, Liga 1's contribution is very limited. In this window, only one domestic-league player is mentioned as a development case: Dion Markx from Persita Tangerang. The rest of the squad — especially the attack — comes from abroad.

This is a paradox. A country of hundreds of millions, with a large domestic league, chooses to import players through passports rather than develop them through academies. Economically, this is a rational short-term choice. Systemically, it is a long-term gamble.

And here is the point I want people to weigh: if a football nation can build a national team without academies, the value of domestic academies falls. But if a football nation does not invest in academies, it becomes permanently dependent on the legal conditions of other countries.

Imagine a scenario. Suppose FIFA tightens eligibility rules in the future. Suppose European countries restrict dual nationals from playing for foreign national teams. Suppose the naturalisation wave is limited by domestic political factors. In any of those scenarios, a nation without domestic academies faces a personnel crisis within one generation.

Of course, this scenario has low probability in the short term. But in football, political and regulatory cycles are usually longer than a player's career. And what is not invested today will not appear ten years from now.

There is another point I want to raise. In analyses of naturalisation, people focus on players. Few focus on the clubs that developed them. Macarthur FC developed Luke Vickery. A Dutch club developed Ole Romeny. European academies developed Eliano Reijnders. These organisations invested time, money, and facilities to produce players who now wear another country's shirt. They receive nothing. No training compensation. No sell-on clause. No financial support.

This is a form of "permanent free transfer" — one of the most advantageous transfer forms for the receiving side and the most disadvantageous for the supplying side. And it is why, in the coming years, I predict discussions at UEFA and FIFA level about whether mass-naturalising federations should share training costs with European clubs.

This sounds far-fetched. But if you have followed media-rights negotiations and financial clauses in European football over the last decade, you understand that nothing is impossible in this world. What is an exception today can be a rule tomorrow.

The Two Debutants and Their Market Value

Back to the two debutants. I want to analyse them the way I analyse every football asset: current value, potential value, and appreciation capacity.

Dion Markx is a defender at Persita Tangerang. He belongs to the group of young players with youth national-team backgrounds, and being called up to the senior squad for a regional tournament is a career turning point. In market terms, a young defender called up for the first time typically has low value until he plays a few international matches. But afterwards, if he performs well, value can rise substantially — especially if major domestic clubs such as Persija or Persib begin to take interest.

This is a dynamic I call the "national platform effect". A player who plays for the national team is priced higher than one of equal ability who does not. Not because he plays better, but because he has been validated by a national-level evaluation system. This is a form of "brand guarantee" that the domestic transfer market values highly.

Luke Vickery has a different configuration. He is a forward playing in the A-League, and his recent naturalisation as an Indonesian citizen places him in a group of players who can benefit twice over: from a European/Australian development base, and from the chance to play international football for a regional national team. In career-strategy terms, this is a good move. In market-value terms, he remains a player unproven at international level.

Both debutants belong to the asset group in a growth phase. Their value will depend on two factors: minutes at the ASEAN Cup and the team's result in the tournament. If Indonesia go deep, and if one of the two plays well, their market value will rise over the following months. If Indonesia exit early, and if both sit on the bench, value will not change materially.

This is why I say short tournaments are "valuation windows" rather than "sporting windows". Sportingly, an eleven-day tournament is not enough to judge a player. In market terms, those eleven days can shift the value of a football asset exponentially. This is the fundamental asymmetry of the player market, and why I always watch short tournaments with particular attention.

Club vs National Team: A Negotiation Usually Ignored

There is an aspect of this story I want to analyse separately: the relationship between clubs and national teams in tournaments outside traditional FIFA windows.

This tournament runs September 25 to October 5. That is the early season phase for many European leagues, and the pre-season phase of the A-League. When a club like Macarthur FC agrees to release Luke Vickery to Indonesia during pre-season preparation, it accepts a sporting loss.

That loss has two forms. The first is integration loss: the player is absent during the most important phase for building cohesion with teammates. The second is injury-risk loss: if the player is injured on national duty, the club may lose an asset without compensation, depending on insurance schemes.

Theoretically, FIFA has a scheme to protect clubs when players are injured during national-team call-ups. But that scheme usually applies to matches inside the FIFA Window and comes with conditions. For a regional tournament outside traditional windows, its applicability is unclear.

This means clubs are accepting risk without matching insurance. In Macarthur FC's case, this is a rational decision in federation-relations terms, but not in asset-management terms. In Persita Tangerang's case, releasing Dion Markx for the national team may also affect their season plans.

I raise this not to criticise. I raise it to stress that international football operates on a basic assumption: clubs will always release players. But that assumption is not guaranteed by contract; it is guaranteed by the power relationship between federations and clubs. When that power weakens, player flows redirect.

This is a trend I have tracked for several years, especially in Asia. Clubs in Japan, Korea, and the Middle East are increasingly vocal about keeping players for regional tournaments. Southeast Asian federations will face similar pressure in the near future, as dependence on foreign-based players grows.

My Evaluation System and Its Potential Blind Spots

No analysis is complete without self-critique. So I want to spend a paragraph on where my analysis may be wrong.

First blind spot: I assume the six omissions are a systemic decision. But there may be personal reasons the article does not state: injury, family issues, club conflict, or disciplinary reasons. In that case, my "attack purge" analysis would be a misreading.

Second blind spot: I assume naturalised players are an organised system. But it may be a chain of individual decisions, with players naturalising voluntarily for personal reasons, and the federation merely accepting outcomes. In that case, the structure I describe does not exist as strategy, only as phenomenon.

Third blind spot: I assume a national-team player's market value is higher than one without caps. This is usually true, but not always. In some cases, being frequently called up without performing well can lower value, because clubs realise the player does not meet international expectations.

Fourth blind spot: I focus on economic and structural aspects, and ignore purely sporting ones. It is possible this squad is genuinely stronger than its predecessor, regardless of my structural analysis. Football remains a sport, not a spreadsheet.

This is why I always remind readers that football analysis is a probabilistic tool, not a prophecy. The goal is not accurate prediction, but a thinking framework to understand events as they occur.

Signals to Watch and How to Read Them

Before finishing, I want to list the specific signals readers should track over the next two weeks. This is how I run my monitoring process, and I think it is useful to anyone who wants deeper insight into Southeast Asian football.

First signal: head coach identity. If the identity is confirmed differently from the source article, the entire analysis of selection philosophy must be revisited. This is the highest-priority signal because it affects all other conclusions.

Second signal: the reason for Eliano Reijnders' omission. If the federation gives a reason at some point — injury, form, tactics — the story can shift from "controversy" to "explained decision". This is a high-value signal because it will change how the whole list reads.

Third signal: minutes for the two debutants. If Dion Markx and Luke Vickery play at least two matches in eleven days, the "regeneration" hypothesis is confirmed. If they only sit on the bench, that hypothesis does not hold.

Fourth signal: Group A results. If Indonesia win all group matches, the regeneration story is reinforced. If Indonesia drop points, the story quickly becomes one about a coach's selection errors.

Fifth signal: reaction of the omitted players. If one of them publicly states he no longer wants to wear the national shirt, this will be a major signal about the future risk of the naturalisation model. Such statements often come later, but when they come, they carry large impact.

These are the signals I will track. Not because I want to predict, but because I want to understand. And in football, understanding usually has longer-term value than prediction.

A Progressive Thought: Are Passports the Future of Southeast Asian Football?

I want to close this article with an open question, not a declaration.

Throughout the history of modern football, small nations have always sought ways to overcome limits of population and financial resources. Some choose academy development. Some choose importing foreign coaches. Some choose transferring tactical models. In the last decade, a new option has appeared: importing players through passports.

Indonesia is the nation that has gone furthest with this option in Southeast Asia. And if they succeed — if they win the 2026 ASEAN Cup with a squad at least half of which is naturalised — other regional nations will face a difficult question: keep investing in academies, or pivot to naturalisation?

This is not a question only for Indonesia. The Philippines have tried. Thailand is trying at a smaller scale. Vietnam is considering. Malaysia is reviewing. Singapore has had a naturalisation system for a long time. In the coming years, every Southeast Asian federation will have to make its choice.

And that choice is not only about sport. It is about identity. It is about how a nation wants to be seen internationally. It is about how a generation of domestic youth players sees its own path.

I have no answer to that question. But I know one thing: every decision in football is a decision about money flow. And money flow, over time, always takes the most efficient road. If naturalisation is cheaper than development, it will replace development. If it replaces development, it will reshape the entire regional game.

What happens over the next eleven days at the ASEAN Cup will not only shape the outcome of one tournament. It will shape how a generation of Southeast Asian football understands its own development strategy.

And that is why, though I only cover the transfer market, I will spend the last days of September and the first of October watching Southeast Asian football. Not for the ball. For the money. "People watch the World Cup to see football; I watch to see money flow." And sometimes, money flow passes through a passport.