In this series of posts, I will be looking at what makes Dutch football unique, and how the game in the Netherlands is developing, including in relation to the ideals– attractive football and giving young players a chance prominent among them– which have given the Dutch game a different character to football in other European countries.
In this first post, I am looking at foreign perspectives of Dutch football, the ways in which the game in the Netherlands is viewed abroad.
-Continued focus on 1970s ideal
What stands out in much of the foreign writing on Dutch football is its focus on the playing style and philosophy of the great Ajax and Dutch teams of the 1970s, which are usually taken to represent Dutch football as a whole. Rinus Michels, Louis van Gaal and, especially, Johan Cruijff are quoted freely; the latter’s claim that ‘there is no medal better than being acclaimed for your style’ seems a fair summation of the way that the world expects Dutch teams to play as a default. Indeed, the link between the world’s idea of Dutch football and a possession-based, positive approach is so engrained that the Barcelona and Spain teams which had so much success between 2008 and 2012 were often said to be playing in more Dutch a way than the Dutch themselves. This angle ignores, however, the ‘pragmatic’ style used with success by Dutch sides even before 2010, such as PSV’s European Cup winners in 1988 under Guus Hiddink and Feyenoord’s Eredivisie title-winning side in 1999 led by Leo Beenhakker.
-Limited focus on Dutch competition
Perhaps one of the key reasons for the world’s largely unchanged perception of Dutch football is the limited exposure of the Eredivisie, the Dutch domestic league, outside of the Netherlands. The limited exposure is best illustrated by the domestic rights situation in China, where as of the 2020-21 season the rights were held by online streaming service K-Ball, a service with only 200.000 subscribers in a country of well over 1 billion inhabitants. As a result, contemporary Dutch football remains an afterthought for most football fans around the world, only becoming relevant during a major tournament in which the Dutch national team is partaking or if a Dutch club makes a run deep into a European competition, as Ajax did in the 2018/19 Champions League. Therefore, there is little opportunity for the world to gain a different image of Dutch football, which could be one reason for the continued association of the ‘Dutch style’ with the great teams of the 1970s.
-Role of FC Barcelona connection
With the lack of prominent international exposure for the Eredivisie, and therefore for contemporary Dutch football, it is perhaps no surprise that ‘Dutch football’ has been able to develop into an ‘idea’, in the words of Winner, which need not remain confined within the borders of the Netherlands. This idea is perhaps best embodied by FC Barcelona, a club which has not only had a large number of Dutch players and managers in the past decades but which has played with a certain tactical style and set of principles—such as believing in players brought through the youth academy—throughout that period. During the high period of Barcelona and the Spanish National Team’s success using the juego de posición, between 2008 and 2012, the influence of Dutch totaalvoetbal was so great that Winner argued that ‘it is now Spain who play Dutch football’. This further points to the idealised image of Dutch football, as an ideal which is fluid and is unattached to any geographic parameters.
Inthehalfspace 