Can a book which purports to be about Dutch football really be a book about Dutch football if the 17th-century painter Pieter Jansz Saenredam is discussed in greater depth than PSV Eindhoven? Given the ingenious approach used by David Winner in his now-classic Brilliant Orange (first published in 2000), the answer is a resounding yes. Winner sets out to write about the ‘idea of Dutch football’, an idea which both overlaps with and is shaped by other societal forces at work in the Netherlands.
Winner portrays Dutch football and society as both undergoing radical transformations from the 1960s, changes which mutually facilitated and reinforced one another. While the Provos movement and rapid secularisation hurtled one of the most conservative countries in Europe into the modern age, Dutch football changed at a similar, blinding pace. Dutch society has changed so drastically since the 1950s that Camus’ description of Amsterdam as a city where ‘pipe smokers have been watching the same rain falling on the same canal for centuries’ seems inconceivable, and the same applies to Dutch football, where totaalvoetbal emerged less than 20 years after the introduction of professionalism to the Dutch game.
This symmetry between football and society more broadly is the point which Winner most skilfully manages to communicate in Brilliant Orange. It is interviewees from outside the football world who provide some of the most interesting insights into the changes which Dutch football underwent during the 1960s and 70s, relating those upheavals to the changing societal mood of the time. Ballet dancer Rudi van Dantzig argues that the 1960s in the Netherlands saw an ‘intense interest in bodily virtuosity’, which found expression both in dance and in a freer way of playing football, while Professor Maarten Hajer notes that a ‘new liberal attitude to authority’ was present both in football and in the social movements which changed Dutch society as a whole during the 1960s. Winner paints a picture of a second liberation of Dutch society twenty years after the end of the German occupation, a liberation which reshaped not only politics and social relations but also the founding principles of Dutch football. It is perhaps fitting that the world’s idea of Dutch society- open, tolerant, receptive to new ideas- slots in so well with the traditional image of Dutch football as developed by Cruijff and Michels, an open, progressive system which looks to entertain.
Winner’s linking of society and football makes Brilliant Orange especially compelling reading for an immigrant to the Netherlands, all the more so for the critical voices which are interspersed throughout the book. Though Winner makes explicit his belief in an ‘idea’ of Dutch football, the book also engages with opposing perspectives arguing against the freewheeling image which the Netherlands has acquired. These dissenting voices often refer to the ‘systematic’ nature of the Dutch way, in both football and more broadly. One of the book’s most memorable passages arrives in a discussion of the vaunted Ajax youth system, in which all youth sides are instructed to play with the same ethos as the senior outfit; the objective of this being to ‘churn out numbered products for the machine’, players who will slot in to the first team without a hitch. Perhaps surprisingly, it is this philosophy, dating back to Michels’ reign at Ajax, which has facilitated the creative genius of Cruijff, Gullit, van Basten, Bergkamp and Robben, players who thrived in disciplined and well-organised setups. As journalist Huub Smeets is quoted in the book, ‘the Dutch are at their best when we can combine the system with individual creativity’; a sentiment which seems, at least in the eyes of an immigrant, to permeate Dutch society, from architecture and the school system to the football pitch. Not for the only time in the book, insights on football prove to be valid in a broader societal context.
Though the book does at times feel somewhat Ajax- and 70s-centric (there is, for instance, rather little discussion of the 1988 European Championship-winning team), and there is surprisingly little attention paid to supporter culture, Brilliant Orange is a delightful work of football sociology, and a very readable one at that. Winner does not try to spin a beautiful web with his prose, and does not need to; his imaginative approach, and the insights offered by his interviewees, are enough. Both for budding football sociologists and for those interested in the Netherlands, Brilliant Orange is a valuable and fascinating resource.
Inthehalfspace 