Ajax's bench and the unequal dialogue: When a Southeast Asian federation pleads with a European club

At an international sports summit in early 2026, the chairman of the Indonesian Football Association (PSSI), Erick Thohir, sat down with the CEO of Ajax Amsterdam to make a request that few dare to state bluntly: give my national team's goalkeeper more playing minutes. The surface story is about Maarten Paes, the half-Indonesian goalkeeper who is losing his starting place at the Dutch club. But dig deeper, and this is a much larger picture about soft power, structural dependency, and the World Cup dreams of a Southeast Asian nation trying to climb the world football map.

Someone once told me: "The quietest revolution always starts on the substitutes' bench." I have relearned that lesson over years of tracking young Southeast Asian talents, and Paes's story is a special version of it. He is not a young player forgotten inside an academy; he is a goalkeeper who already earned a spot at a top European club - and is being pushed to the margins by that same club's internal mechanism.

The context must be read from both sides. On the Indonesian side: PSSI is rolling out a comprehensive reform package that few actually see - Super League with VAR, the Club Licensing system, the Elite Pro Academy for youth development, and the NDRC dispute resolution body to protect players when clubs face financial problems. The FIFA ranking is reported to have risen from 153 to 118 in just a few years. That is a real jump on paper, even if no one has verified the quality of the wins along the way.

On the Ajax side: an experienced, big-name goalkeeper has reportedly arrived to compete for the starting shirt. Paes - whom Ajax once nicknamed as "the son of the crowd" because of his commercial pull in the Southeast Asian market - now has to sit and watch. From first-hand match-watching experience, I understand that for a goalkeeper, losing continuous playing minutes is unlike any other position on the pitch: match sharpness, command of the penalty area, the reflexes in one-on-one situations - all of it erodes quickly when you are merely sitting on the bench holding a water bottle.

The core of this story is not about Paes - it is about one nation's strategic dependence on a single player. When the PSSI chairman has to fly personally to meet a Dutch club CEO to discuss a goalkeeper's minutes, that signals something very specific: PSSI does not have enough internationally-class backup goalkeepers, and Paes is genuinely the "irreplaceable piece" in their World Cup plan. This is not employee protection - it is the public admission of a strategic gap. I have learned this through years of digging into mid-tier national teams: a country without a deep enough goalkeeper pipeline will always live in anxiety every time its number-one loses form.

Going deeper, the lesson is not just Indonesian. A federation that tries to sell a "very healthy commercialization" image while simultaneously admitting that "many domestic clubs face financial problems" - those are two contradictory realities. It reveals a two-tier football economy: a few wealthy, properly-licensed Super League clubs at the top, and a long tail of smaller clubs struggling with wages and payroll. That is the classic pattern of a federation trying to professionalize but lacking the data to prove it is succeeding.

Another important point that Indonesian media perhaps has not emphasized enough: the detail about a high-profile goalkeeper joining Ajax - that claim needs independent verification. If the detail is inaccurate, the actual picture could be that Paes is simply being pushed out by an internal option or a new low-profile signing - the structure of the story remains correct, only the competitor changes. I always remind myself: before they become legends, they were just a name on the substitutes' list.

The contrarian angle: the PSSI chairman's public intervention may backfire. Coaches in Europe resent outside pressure on squad selection. When Thohir says "I believe Maarten will keep learning" - that is a character endorsement, not a performance endorsement. In the dressing room, the coach picks whoever is playing well, not whoever is being shielded by a foreign federation president. PSSI is staking its chairman's personal credibility on an outcome it cannot control. If Paes stays on the bench, Thohir himself will have to absorb the domestic backlash.

Another frequently overlooked angle: Paes remains a commercially valuable asset for Ajax in the Southeast Asian market. Even if he is the second-choice goalkeeper on the pitch, keeping him in the squad still has marketing value. That could be why Ajax has not yet offloaded him despite the intense competition. But if he also loses his national-team starting place due to insufficient playing time, then his commercial value evaporates too - that is the spiral few are noticing.

I witnessed a young Vietnamese talent whom I once nicknamed "de Jong Vietnam" tear his cruciate ligament in 2026, and that painful lesson taught me: behind every statistic is a real human being. Paes is at the prime age for a goalkeeper (around 26-27), with significant development runway still ahead, but only if he actually plays. A loan deal in the January transfer window could be the optimal solution for all three parties: PSSI keeps its number-one goalkeeper for the qualification campaign, Paes gets minutes to preserve match sharpness, and Ajax frees up salary space while retaining a buy-back option.

Over years of unearthing forgotten talents, I have come to understand: where no one is looking, that is where the first gems are found. The Paes story is not about a forgotten player. It is about a federation trying to build a system that is not yet deep enough. It raises a bigger question: is Indonesia really building a next layer of goalkeepers, or is it still living off a single talent in Europe? If the answer is the latter, then any injury, any dip in form, any selection decision from the Ajax bench could collapse an entire World Cup plan. The lesson for all of Southeast Asia - including the people running Vietnamese football who are watching this story - is: do not let big dreams depend on a single name. Dig the system deeper, because the next generation of goalkeepers will not fall from the sky.