The price of instant gratification in football is always paid in future despair. Just ask the 280 million souls of Indonesia, a nation with an eternal, desperate football dream, who have just watched their World Cup fantasy – one purchased on a high-interest, naturalised loan – explode in a familiar cloud of smoke.
It was a Faustian bargain for a quick buck, a football lottery where the ticket was the team’s long-term soul. And when the results didn’t hit the jackpot, who paid the price? Not the architects of the policy, of course. They rolled out the red carpet for the patsy – the hapless coach.
Let’s be clear about what the naturalisation project really is: it’s football’s “Easy Button”, a way to skip decades of grinding, necessary work.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous nation, decided that actual player development – building proper pitches, hiring competent youth coaches, and nurturing a consistent philosophy – was simply too tedious.
Instead, it looked to Europe and decided to buy success. The FA poured money and political capital into recruiting diaspora players, many with Dutch heritage and experience in competitive, if not elite, leagues. The idea was simple, if deeply cynical: inject some European DNA into the Garuda squad and watch the magic happen.
The expectation that followed wasn’t modest “improvement” – it was the kind of inflated, impossible dream only a football-obsessed nation could conjure. When the team reached the fourth round of Asian Cup qualification – a genuinely historic milestone, the farthest Indonesia had gone since the Dutch East Indies played in 1938 – the reaction wasn’t one of pride. It was a collective groan: “World Cup or bust, you failures!”
Success was no longer enough; only a miracle would do. Which brings us to the ultimate fall guy – Patrick Kluivert.
Kluivert was never meant to coach a developing nation. He was hired as a miracle worker – a famous Dutch name meant to validate the entire, expensive naturalisation gamble.
But he was asked to drive a Ferrari without an engine: a team built on scattered talent with no coherent, long-term philosophy. His swift, “mutual termination” last week was not a sacking for failure; it was a sacking for failing to achieve the impossible on an accelerated timeline. He reached a historic high, but didn’t deliver the fairytale ending.
The Indonesian FA, having missed its jackpot, simply took the star face of the project and threw him under the bus – or, more accurately, off a moving train.
This is the pathetic, predictable cycle of the quick-fix approach: hype it up, buy the talent, install a celebrity coach, demand instant glory – and when it falls short, sack the coach and pretend the problem is solved.
The real scandal isn’t that Indonesia failed to qualify. The scandal lies in the self-sabotage this model perpetuates. Coaching instability kills development. A naturalisation policy, especially one designed to fast-track success, demands immense stability to work.
You need a coach who stays five years – long enough to instil a single tactical identity, integrate foreign-born players, and, most importantly, connect the senior team with the youth structure. Instead, Indonesia resets to zero once more.
The new coach will discard Kluivert’s plans. His assistants are gone. Whatever youth curriculum existed will be shredded. It’s a cycle of perpetual reset.
The nation traded genuine, long-term growth for one failed qualification campaign. The ultimate cost isn’t the millions spent on imported players – it’s the lost generation of local youth now watching their national team filled with expensive imports and led by a revolving door of foreign managers, wondering if they’ll ever get a chance.
Indonesia’s heartbreaking journey should hang on the wall of every football association that believes globalised talent can replace homegrown strategy and patience. It’s a cautionary tale for a world hooked on instant gratification: you can buy the best ingredients, but if you keep firing the chef, all you’ll ever serve is chaos.
The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of Twentytwo13.
Main image: PSSI / Facebook
