Martin Ort’s laptop last night “did not close until half past five and open again at half past ten”. The owner of the Strand 22 eatery only has time for a chat this Saturday. “For years I dragged everyone to the stadium,” says Ort. “Now they are suddenly all on the app.”
Ort – also director of the Stadshart Almere Business Association – is busy organizing the ceremony of Almere City FC next Monday afternoon. The club from the Kitchen Champion Division can promote to the Eredivisie for the first time on Sunday. That chance is very high: only if Almere City loses more than 2-0 to opponent FC Emmen, promotion will not take place.
Almere has been close before. Ort, who is dressed in a black polo with the logo of Almere City, has been a fan since the very beginning. He organizes the ceremony every time his club makes the play-offs. “This is the only event in the world that has been organized seven times and has never happened,” he says. The ceremony should take place this year on the Esplanade, a boulevard in the center. Singer René Schuurmans will, if all goes well, ‘Let the sun in your heart’ sing, the anthem of the club.
Image problem
Promotion to the Eredivisie would be a huge boost for the city. Ever since the first homes were built in Almere in the 1970s, the city has been struggling with an image problem. Almere would be a bare, gray city, without soul and history. A city where, because almost all of the 224,000 inhabitants were not born there, social cohesion is lacking.
Readers of de Volkskrant crowned Almere in 2008 as the ugliest municipality in the Netherlands. And last year the negative publicity of the Floriade was added to that. The world horticultural exhibition cost the municipality about 90 million euros, more than nine times what had been budgeted, and was faced with disappointing visitor numbers. It led to the resignation of the city’s outgoing council in June last year.
Read more about what went wrong at the Floriade: ‘How did the Floriade become such a debacle?’
Anyone who thinks that Almere is just a bare concrete city has never set foot in the city, according to Martin Ort. It is also difficult, he says, to love a city that has no “icons”. “No Eiffel Tower, Erasmus Bridge or Royal Palace on Dam Square. And a city without history, who wants to stand up for that?”
An Eredivisie club must help tilt the image. And make the Almouder proud of his city again. “Because what do people think when they think of Heerenveen?” says Ort. “Correct. SC Heerenveen.”
Pasta with tomato sauce
In the kitchen of the stadium of Almere City at the Competitieweg 22 player cook Tina Leotta a large pot of water to boil. The squad of the first team, just finished with the private morning training, eat pasta – as always the day before a match. “With tomato sauce and minced chicken,” says Leotta. “Good for the calories.”
For Almere City director John Bes, it is part of what he calls “getting a grip on an elusive world”. In other words: at a professional football club, all peripheral matters must be in perfect order. So that the players on the field only have to focus on one thing: winning.
In Almere we are used to defeats
In 2010, the Kroonenberg Group took over the club from Amsterdam real estate billionaire Lesley Bamberger, which at the time was at the bottom of the Eerste Divisie year after year under the name FC Omniworld. Bes has been working as a director at the club since 2016. A job with “the ugliest duckling in the Eredivisie in a city where you did not want to be found dead,” says Bes. “I thought: come on.” A new stadium (the Yanmar Stadium, 4,500 spectators) and an ambitious five-year plan were to make Almere City – the youngest professional football organization in the Netherlands – worthy of the Eredivisie.
A photo in Bes’s office recalls a moment when Almere City was almost there: the final of the play-offs on May 20, 2018, in Doetinchem against De Graafschap. In the photo, a De Graafschap player duels with Jergé Hoefdraad, an Almere City player who died in August 2021 after a shooting at an Amsterdam party. Bes calls the death of Hoefdraad “a low point in the history of the club”.
Almere is cult
Then, during the match against De Graafschap, both club and city were not really ready for the Eredivisie, says Bes. “Five years ago, people mainly bought a season ticket here because they wanted to see PSV, Ajax and Feyenoord.”
But the Ajax shirts in the city have increasingly been exchanged for Almere City shirts. It has become ‘cult’ to be Almouder, says Bes. Entrepreneurs suddenly want to belong to Almere City: tickets for the business club are sold out. “Young people who were born here take their parents to the club,” says Bes. “History doesn’t get in the way here.”
Beach tent owner Martin Ort also sees that the time is right for Eredivisie football in Almere. And what if it unexpectedly doesn’t happen again? “We are used to defeats in Almere,” says Ort. “Pick up shards and have no more.”