An Old Rivalry in a changed world

On a night which saw seven countries book their places at the World Cup Finals in Qatar, the resumption of the rivalry between The Netherlands and Germany felt like a rare survivor from an older, pre-commercial era of football and a good way to measure out just how fully monetisation has pressed its stamp on the upper crust of European football.

This old rivalry, flowing out of the Dutch humiliation during the Second World War and fuelled by frequent crunch meetings in intervening decades, seemed one of the few constants in a swirl of change. The anti-German chants cascading down the steep stands of the Johan Cruijff Arena and customary booing of the Deutschlandlied felt, in a certain sense, almost reassuringly familiar in a refigured world. The legendary Dutch manager Rinus Michels, in charge of Oranje for both the 1974 World Cup final loss against Germany and the semi-final victory at Euro 1988 against the same opponents, may have described football as ‘something like war’, yet that notion feels suddenly rather suspect as an actual war of agression rages in Europe for the first time in nearly eight decades. Yet if Michels’ quote now appears in a different light, it fits the Heraclitean mood of that late March evening. For though the match may have been between two opponents who first met in 1910, the circumstances surrounding this latest encounter reflected a football world changed in many ways beyond recognition.

Take the match’s immediate purpose, for instance, as a run-through of ideas in preparation for this winter’s exertions in Qatar. The observations and adjustments made by van Gaal and Hansi Flick will be put to use on the pristine pitches inside new-built stadia in the desert, a sort of footballing terra nova and a far cry from the Düsseldorf mudbath which provided the stage for the famous Dutch victory over Germany, then the defending world champions, in 1956.

Qatar’s hosting of football’s most prestigious event has come in for criticism on numerous grounds, not least the deaths of an estimated 6.500 migrant workers tasked with casting up venues set to be filled to capacity just a handful of times, and van Gaal added himself to the critical chorus in a recent presser, but from a slightly different angle. Never one to hide his opinion, van Gaal termed Qatar’s host function ‘ridiculous’ and ‘bullshit’, and labelled the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar the result of ‘money and FIFA’s commercial interests.’ This quote is illuminating, demonstrating just how thoroughly the tensions between big money and footballing traditionalists have become entrenched.

That contrast, though, between ‘football’ and ‘commercialism’ begins to appear fuzzy when looking at the context in which Tuesday’s match was played. Take the fixture’s setting, for instance, at the Johan Cruijff Arena, built on the outskirts of Amsterdam during the early stages of football’s great monetisation in the 1990s. Chain shops and fast food restaurants cling to the ground’s exterior, office buildings cluster around the Bijlmer Arena railway station, and between them exists a sort of emptiness. The Arena provides the raison d’être for an entire urban district, existing in its own space, hemmed in by water and a railway line on one side but otherwise not subject to the limitations of a pre-existing urban footprint. Walking around the ground before kick-off, your correspondent was struck by the resemblance of the ArenA to the typical North American stadium, towering above empty space and endowing its surroundings with their meaning.

This is perhaps no coincidence; as outlined in The Club, Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg’s marvellous book on the Premier League’s rise into a commercial juggernaut, American stadiums served as the examples to be copied when English football was attempting to shake off its image as a sport enjoyed primarily by hooligans and appeal to both to a broader demographic and to sponsors whose new-found interest in football would lead to an infusion of capital into the sport. The Arena was constructed to help Ajax keep pace with this decisive surge in capital among Europe’s élite, and as such represents a very different idea of football than a stadium like De Kuip, six decades older and enclosed by the Maas river on one side and a railway line on the other, and thus a part of its surroundings, rather than the centre of them.

In other ways, too, the haziness of the contrast between commercial interests and ‘pure’ sport were apparent in the ArenA. Of the 22 players in the respective starting line-ups, 10 had been the subject of transfer fees of 30 million euros or more; 9 are under contract at one of the twelve clubs which attempted to form a breakaway ‘Super League’ last year. The Dutch and German player pools are, as is evidenced by these statistics, largely derived from Europe’s top 15 or so clubs, outfits which see participation in the most prestigious club competition as a sort of birthright and who have taken the initiative in European football’s transition from a form of mass entertainment shrouded in the intimacies of a specific place to a geographically-agnostic spectacle. Van Gaal may have cautioned Ajax manager Erik ten Hag not to take over at Manchester United (a warning which ten Hag appears set to ignore) on the grounds that United is a ‘commercial club, not a football club’, yet Van Gaal’s team selection was an implicit acknowledgement of the woolliness of that distinction. Those in the respective XIs not yet absorbed into the élite-club whirlwind—such as Feyenoord’s Tyrell Malacia, one of the best performers in an orange shirt on the night—will have seen the Arena pitch as an ideal platform to exhibit their worth to any big-club managers scanning proceedings.

The theme of change extended to the tactical set-up employed by Louis van Gaal as well. Long seen as a manager wedded to the 1-4-3-3 formation, Van Gaal has fallen in love with his mistress the 1-3-4-3, which in his eyes compensates for the relative dearth of top-quality Dutch wingers. Many of the classic traits of Dutch football were in evidence, such as the use of interesting passing angles to stimulate the attack and the use of the keeper to assist in building up the play, and the Netherlands’ second-half equaliser came out of a moment of symmetry between philosophies old and new, as Frenkie de Jong, the modern heir of the Cruijffian style, picked out the run of wing-back Denzel Dumfries at the far post, with the latter then able to prod the ball into the path of goalscorer Steven Bergwijn. It was a fitting encapsulation of the contrast and melting-together between old and new which hung heavy in the Amsterdam air.