#2: Indonesia's national football team
The 1938 World Cup, Maarten Paes, and the road to World Cup 2026 qualification.
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Let’s get started with this edition’s topic.
Football in Indonesia, with a focus on the men’s national team.
The 1938 World Cup
Indonesia’s men’s national football team is known as Pasuka Garuda - in English, this means the Garuda Squad. (A Garuda is a mythical bird that you often find in Indonesia, for instance, the national airline is called Garuda Indonesia and features a Garuda bird in its logo, and the top-left of this Substack has a small Garuda graphic.)
The team has never qualified for the FIFA World Cup as Indonesia, but they did take part in the 1938 FIFA World Cup under the name Dutch East Indies - which FIFA considers, in their records, to be the same team as post-colonial Indonesia. The Dutch East Indies got to the 1938 World Cup without playing any qualifying games. There was supposed to be a qualifying match with Japan, but Japan withdrew, and the Dutch East Indies automatically qualified.
At that time, the World Cup was a straight knockout tournament with no group stage. The one match the Dutch East Indies played at the tournament was against Hungary, which they lost 6-0. Therefore, the many weeks of travelling by ship had all been for one game. But still, Indonesia can say they were the first Asian country to compete at the FIFA World Cup. Also, their loss was to one of the finalists. (Hungary got the final, in which they lost to Italy, who retained the World Cup.)
Why do big countries struggle?
On a population basis, Indonesia has underachieved in world football, especially considering countries with populations of less than 4 million, such as Uruguay (population 3.42 million), and Croatia (population of 3.84 million) have done so well in the competition.
With football, population size doesn’t equate to success. Although it’s easy to think that the bigger the population, the easier it will be to find a great team of players. How hard can it be to find 11 starting players and some substitutes? Very hard it seems. In fact, all of the world’s top five countries by population have underperformed at the football World Cup.
India, the world’s most populous country, has never played at a World Cup tournament. They qualified for the 1950 tournament by default as the other teams in their qualifying group pulled out, but the team decided not to participate.
China qualified for the 2002 World Cup, co-hosted by South Korea and Japan, but lost all their games and went home without scoring a goal.
The USA reached the semi-finals in 1930, and the quarter-finals in 2002. Since 2002, they’ve struggled, and all things considered, for a country with such a wide array of sporting success and financial means, the results haven’t been good.
Indonesia - See above.
Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous country, has never qualified for a World Cup tournament, and doesn’t seem likely to any time soon.
In the case of India and Pakistan, it’s undeniable that Cricket is a far more popular sport than football. Perhaps not playing at a World Cup finals tournament just doesn’t cause too much of a stir. For the USA and China, at various points, significant investment has been made in both their domestic leagues and national teams. But the results haven’t followed.
Indonesia’s national sport is badminton, yet it’s also a country of passionate football fans and playing at the 2026 World Cup would be a dream come true for many people in the country.
The road to World Cup 2026
When I was recently in Indonesia, the Garuda played Australia. The game ended 0-0.
I watched the game on local TV. One strange aspect of watching a football game on Indonesian TV is that there are constant adverts (commercials) that take up approximately the bottom 20% of the screen. You can still see the full game, but it gets compressed while the advert plays. It was annoying, especially the sheer number of adverts that kept popping up, it was relentless, but it's seemingly normal. I won’t complain about the adverts on British TV during half time again!
At the end of the game, the Indonesian President at that time - Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi - greeted the Indonesian players pitchside. He shook hands with every player and chatted with them, something which I can’t imagine most Western leaders doing, especially after drawing a game 0-0. But the expectations are different.
The England football team go into every major tournament hoping to win the whole tournament. This is similar for the other large European countries, such as Spain, Italy, France and Germany (for European teams, the major tournaments are the FIFA World Cup and UEFA European Championship, which are both played alternately every four years). On the other hand, for Indonesia, just qualifying to play at a World Cup would be a worthwhile achievement.
Following the Australia game, Jokowi did an interview with local media, which can be seen above. It’s worth watching to see the different attitude and expectations towards football in Indonesia compared to Western Europe. (You can enable auto-translate subtitles on YouTube if you don’t speak Bahasa Indonesia.) Firstly Jokowi praises the team and says that gaining a point from the 0-0 draw is something to celebrate of as it takes the Garuda that bit closer to their goal of qualification, for which he estimates they’ll need to get to 15 points. Secondly, Jokowi mentions that the draw was particularly pleasing, as Australia was ranked 24th in the FIFA world rankings at the time of the game, whereas Indonesia was ranked 131st. This huge gap in ranking means that Australia would have been expected to win the game, but this comes to the third point Jokowi made in this interview - the exceptional performance of Indonesia’s goal keeper Maarten Paes.
Maarten Paes and nationality
Maarten Paes plays for FC Dallas in Major League Soccer (MLS). He had played for the Dutch youth team, but he was eligible to play for Indonesia as his grandmother was born in the Dutch East Indies. She was of European descent but was born in Kediri, East Java (the largest island of Indonesia), and lived in Indonesia, at that time known as the Dutch East Indies, for several years. Maarten Paes spoke of his grandmother’s experience:
"(My grandmother) was born there, lived there for 5–6 years, and then World War II broke out. She spent several years in Spanish and Japanese camps. After that, she returned to the Netherlands by ship," he explained.
The story continued with how Maarten Paes' grandmother returned to Indonesia. According to him, she experienced losing her mother during the war.
"She returned for a few years and then went back to the Netherlands. That’s part of history. But she always spoke with gratitude about her time there, especially the time before the war.
"During the war, she lost her mother in an isolation camp. She always spoke with high respect for the nation and country. She had a tremendous influence on my life. That’s why this (playing for the Indonesian national team) feels like a tribute to her," Paes explained.
The eligibility of playing for a national team is based on several criteria. Place of birth of parents or grandparents can play a factor, but different national football associations have their own rules, which interact with FIFA’s own rulebook. Also covered by these rules are the possibility of players changing the country they represent. In Maarten Paes’ case, even though he represented the Netherlands previously, as it was before the age of 21 he was able to change his representation after taken on Indonesian citizenship earlier this year.
For some players, changing the national team they represent can be a way of playing and experiencing international football after they realise they won’t make the cut for their country of birth. In the case of Maarten Paes I think there’s more to it than that. He has a genuine warmth for Indonesia that shines through when he talks about his second homeland, and he isn’t taking an easy option by playing for the Garuda. He has to travel for 19 hours from Dallas to Jakarta when playing a home game for Indonesia. His 6”3 (191cms) frame helped him saved a penalty in his first international game for Indonesia against Saudi Arabia in early September. (Let’s be honest there’s not many Indonesians of this height.) Following this he put in a strong performance against Australia, earning presidential praise and he soon became a fan favourite.
The next steps to World Cup 2026
If Indonesia does qualify for World Cup 2026 they will be the lowest ranked team to ever qualify for a World Cup, but it’s far from impossible. They have a real chance.
Qualifying for the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) region comprises of three groups. Indonesia currently sits in third spot in Group C. This is the third round of the qualification tournament, and the first round in which teams can advance directly to the World Cup. But only the top two teams from each group go straight to the World Cup. The third and fourth-place teams in each group go into the fourth round, which is two mini-leagues of three teams. The winning teams of each of these mini-leagues advance to the World Cup, but there is even a chance for the second place teams to make it via a play off game.
Since the 0-0 draw with Australia, Indonesia’s results have been mixed.
There was an explosive 2-2 draw with Bahrain away from home on October 10th. The game had a controversial ending - from the Indonesian perspective - as the referee played many minutes of extra time, and Bahrain scored their equaliser in the 99th minute. Bahrain has requested to move their next game with Indonesia, which will be played in Jakarta in March, to a neutral venue. But the game is still due to be played in the Indonesian capital.
On October 15th, despite having 75% of the ball possession, Indonesia lost to China 2-1 in a game played in the Eastern Chinese coastal city of Qingdao. This game was undoubtedly a big disappointment as China are regarded as the weakest team in the group.
On November 14th, the Garuda lost at home to Japan 0-4. Not a big surprise as Japan are an excellent team and undefeated in the group so far. It’s likely they will finish the campaign winning nearly all their games (their record so far is 5 wins and 1 draw).
But the best news for Indonesian football for some time came on November 19th. Playing in Jakarta, Indonesia beat Saudi Arabia 2-0. Both goals came from Marselino Ferdinan, who plays for Oxford United in England (a club in the EFL Championship, the league that’s one level below the Premier League).
With the win against Saudi Arabia, the Garuda have given their qualification hopes a real chance. It will be tough, but not impossible, to come second in the group, however given how tight the group is, finishing in the top four is a real possibility. Their next two games are against Australia (A) and Bahrain (H), both of which take place in March 2025. The target will be at least three points from these two games. Before then there is the 2024 ASEAN Championship, officially known as the ASEAN Mitsubishi Electric Cup 2024.
More on nationality in football
The case of Maartin Paes got me thinking about the topic of nationality in football in more detail. It seems that some countries have caused controversy in recent years by providing citizenship to players seemingly for the purpose of them to play for the national team. Some small countries may find it hard to make up a team to a high standard, and therefore providing citizenship to a select group of players widens the talent pool to help them compete better with other teams.
In the UK, we have a strange case, there’s only one passport - that of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - but there’s actually four national football teams in the UK. If a parent or grandparent is born in one part of the UK then a player is eligible to play for that national team. Or they can represent the country in which they were born. As an example, Tottenham Hotspur forward Brennan Johnson, was born in Nottingham, England, to a Jamaican father and a Welsh mother. He could have represented England, Wales, or even Jamaica. But being Welsh I’m happy that he opted for Wales!
I had seen a video of Indonesia’s football crazed-culture on YouTube a few months ago, including of its violent ultras. I was a bit surprised by the whole video. I had thought that Indonesia didn’t have much of a football culture given its lack of success internationally.
I would love to see Indonesia in the 2026 World Cup. The Indonesian people deserve to see their football at the world’s preeminent tournament.