Culture
How Indonesia turns unknown footballers into adored superstars: ‘We couldn’t leave the hotel’
Maarten Paes is the starting goalkeeper for Major League Soccer team FC Dallas. Yet he can walk down a busy street in Dallas, Texas, and nobody will notice him.
That is not the case online. Or in Indonesia.
Like his team-mates in the Indonesia national team, Paes is mobbed when he visits the country and has a huge social media following, far bigger than would be expected of a player yet to trouble football’s uppermost echelons.
Paes, 26, was born in the Netherlands but became an Indonesian citizen in April and was shocked by the rapid growth of his socials — he has 1.7million followers on Instagram and 1.2m on TikTok.
“You already know before it happens because you’ve seen it happen to other players. It’s such a huge country and they are all in love with soccer,” Paes says.
The 26-year-old knew he was eligible to play for Indonesia for a couple of years but at the end of last year, the team reached out to him again. “At that time, my grandmother was declining in her health,” he says.
“She’s from there and I spoke with her a lot about it. It was a thing I could do that would make her smile at the end of her life. That was huge for me. She said, ‘I would really love if you would do that’. So she encouraged me and it was an honour to do it for her.”
After news broke that he was switching to Indonesia, his life changed. “That was when I felt I needed to get a relationship with my social media in a different way, where you can put it away for a while because it can be a little bit overwhelming,” he says. “It’s surreal that suddenly you’re getting adored by so many followers and such big crowds.”
Paes, who represented the Netherlands at youth level, played his first two games for Indonesia during the recent break. He says the goalless draw against Australia, who were 109 places above Indonesia in FIFA’s world rankings, in front of more than 70,000 fans at the Gelora Bung Karno Stadium was eye-opening.
“It was like for the first time it all hit me, how big it is,” he says. “You see it on the internet, you see the numbers and you can’t really wrap your head around it. Then we couldn’t leave the hotel without security.”
Oxford United, who sit ninth in the Championship, England’s second tier, rarely generate big numbers on social media, but in August, a video they posted on Instagram hit 5.2million views.
Australian A-League side Brisbane Roar experienced a similarly curious upturn in engagement across social channels this month too. Like Oxford, Brisbane’s videos posted to Instagram are usually viewed thousands of times. Yet back-to-back videos posted to Instagram garnered 4.5million and 1.7million views for Roar.
The explanation? You’ve guessed it: the summer arrival of two Indonesian soccer superstars, in the form of the national team’s youngsters Marselino Ferdinan and Rafael Struick.
Ferdinan is a 20-year-old attacking midfielder who signed for Oxford from Belgian second-division side Deinze last month. Struick is a 21-year-old forward who joined Brisbane (owned by Indonesian conglomerate Bakrie Group) from ADO Den Haag, in Dutch football’s second tier, this month.
Neither arrived as a household name, at least in Europe or Australia, nor were they from well-known clubs.
Within days of Ferdinan joining Oxford, their follower count on Instagram grew from 83,000 to 226,000. Some of Brisbane’s previous posts received less than 10 replies. Struick’s announcement had 9,000.
This is the Indonesia effect. The country in south-east Asia has a population of more than 280million people and football is the No 1 sport. Cue adoration for national team players and fanaticism online and offline.
To illustrate the point, below are some stats compiled by The Athletic to compare Indonesia’s starting XI with the United States men’s national team’s starting XI — but we’re not looking at expected goals or progressive passing. We’re comparing Instagram followers.
Indonesia’s starting XI for their World Cup qualifier against Australia had a collective Instagram following of 26.9million. The 11 clubs they play for have a combined following of under 10m on the same app.
In comparison, USMNT’s last starting XI from their friendly against New Zealand had a combined following of only 1.4m.
That number could have been higher but Christian Pulisic, the AC Milan forward with 7.8m followers on Instagram, was on the bench.
What comparing the two starting XIs should highlight is the level of support for Indonesian players compared with, for example, a country of more than 335million people that will host the men’s World Cup in 2026.
The only players in the starting XI for Indonesia’s goalless draw with Australia who have fewer followers than the club they play for are Rizky Ridho, who plays centre-back for Indonesian Liga 1 side Persija Jakarta, and Justin Hubner, who is at Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Premier League.
Hubner, 21, joined Wolves’ youth ranks in 2020. He has yet to feature for the senior side and plays the majority of his games at academy level — but with the national team, he is treated like he plays week in and week out for Real Madrid, such is the fanfare he experiences online and in person.
“I can’t leave my hotel (in Indonesia) because there are people waiting for me, running to me. Everywhere I go it’s crazy,” Hubner tells The Athletic. “If I go into a shop and then walk out, there will be maybe 100 people waiting. I’m their idol, so they are waiting for me, for pictures and autographs.”
More on the world of social media and football…
Hubner was born in the Netherlands and played alongside Xavi Simons (an Instagram star as a teenager at Barcelona, he had one million followers before he was 14 and now plays for RB Leipzig) in Dutch youth national teams. With Indonesia once a Dutch colony, a growing number of players in the national team have dual citizenship.
“I had maybe 5,000 followers on Instagram and when the fans realised I had Indonesian blood it went to 30k and now I’m at 2.7million,” says Hubner. “In terms of social media, everything has just grown so fast. Everything from brand deals too. There’s so much coming to me now. It’s a dream.”
The day before speaking to The Athletic, his deal with deodorant firm Rexona was launched. “A lot of team-mates here at Wolves say, ‘Can I change my national team to Indonesia?’, as a joke.
“But the guys here support me and are happy for me. They also want followers because it’s nice to have, but it is not about followers, the important thing is that I’m playing for the national team and what comes with it is really nice.”
Hubner went on loan to Japanese side Cerezo Osaka last season and says there were always Indonesia fans there to watch him, but when he travelled back to England following the two World Cup qualifier games against Saudi Arabia and Australia, there was no welcome party like there would have been at Jakarta airport. He returned to his apartment alone and without the need for security.
“It’s a different world,” Hubner says about his quiet life in Wolverhampton. “When I come back to Europe it is like I am living my own life, no stress. In Indonesia, there is a crazy side. You have no privacy, wherever you go there’s always people recording you, it’s nice but it is also good to get back to your own space and privacy.
“When I landed in Indonesia, I tried to hide myself with a cap and a mask but they recognised me straight away. Even the security and police wanted pictures with me. There was 50 to 60 people who wanted a picture. My family are also quite famous now. I made an Instagram account for my mum and she has nearly 50,000 followers. Everyone recognises her. The first time she went to Indonesia, she was asking why people wanted pictures with her.”
When fans meet Hubner he says it is not uncommon for them to be overawed with emotion. Some have cried. His mother, Brigitte, has received direct messages from fans who dream of marrying her son. This star factor is something clubs are trying to tap into.
“Dallas have been noticing it,” goalkeeper Paes says. “There’s been a big boost in terms of engagement for the club. If I play for a club, I like to help them as much as possible because they help me a lot too. My main focus is to keep the balls out of the net for them, but help to build this club, build awareness.”
Oxford, Ferdinan’s new club, are co-owned by Erick Thohir, an Indonesian businessman who helped restore them to the second tier after a 25-year hiatus. Thohir was also appointed head of the Football Association of Indonesia last year and is behind the drive to improve the national team, youth teams and wider football across Indonesia.
“The exciting thing about Marselino is that he is the best young Indonesian talent,” says Thohir. “He’s 20, he’s been playing and training in Belgium.
“We need to be investing in young players at Oxford. He’s young but he has played more than 20 times for our national team, so the Oxford manager wants to give him a chance, and that’s the most important thing.
“If he brings more awareness to Oxford, it is an extra value.
“We want to see an opportunity for any players who can play,” he adds. “So let’s see if Marselino can survive in Oxford because we don’t give any red carpet or VIP treatment. He has to compete.”
(Top photos: Robertus Pudyanto, Mohamed Farag, Zhizhao Wu, Noushad Thekkayil, Getty Images; design: Meech Robinson)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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