Oranje the Dutch national football team

The main aim of this blog is to clue up the rest of the English-speaking world on Dutch football so where better to start than with the national football team? Rarely free from controversy and scandal, the team is usually at least instantly recognisable with its bright orange shirts, ably accompanied by stadiums full of fans sporting the same brash colour which, incidentally, no longer appears on the Dutch national flag but is the traditional colour of the Dutch royal family.

Most football fans will have seen the Dutch team in action at various World Cups or Euro Championships and the chances are they got quite far in the tournament.
Which is quite amazing for a country of ‘only’ 16 million inhabitants.
It seems there is hardly ever a season where some star from Holland doesn’t reach the dizzying heights of football fame or is transferred for some cosmic amount to one of the big teams of the English, Spanish or Italian leagues, and they all spend various periods turning out for the national team, from Cruyff through Neeskens, van Basten, Gullit to Bergkamp, Robben, van der Sar and van Persie.
Again, for a reasonably small country, a fantastic list of talent.
They even managed to win the European Championships in 1988 thanks to the dream combination of Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard and others under the leadership of one of the most legendary Dutch managers of all time, Rinus Michels.
However, despite the big names and performances, the Dutch national team is not exactly worshipped back home in Holland. Yes, the streets do turn orange and the supermarkets do offer all kinds of novelty souvenirs during these tournament campaigns but as so often in Holland, first impressions should be accompanied by a large pinch of salt.
And when the team—almost inevitably—do exit the competition before the final, the streets immediately return to normal and football is no longer the gossip of the day—except for the tv sports commentators who fill many hours of domestic tv and newspaper columns with their unrelenting criticism. Even stranger, this sudden denial does not seem to bother the average Dutch fan too much—they somehow remain phlegmatic in the face of failure.
The truth is that many Dutch football fans actively dislike the national team and its players, regarding them as overpaid primadonnas who do not have an ounce of passion in their souls. And we haven’t even mentioned the fact that many Dutch ultras do not have love enough for any other team but their own domestic club.
At first glance, this attitude may seem unfair, especially if they only went out in the semi-finals! But as usual with the Dutch, you have to scrape the surface to find the real picture. The Dutch sports mindset is a powerful but complex phenomenon which is at the base of their success in football in particular.
More on this mindset next time.

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