Feyenoord champion. Rightly so. The best club of this season on all fronts. Rarely have I seen such exuberance as last weekend. First the greedy anticipation of the Rotterdammers, then the high mass in the Kuip and then the Monday euphoria on the Coolsingel. And nothing has been broken. There was laughter, crying, singing, partying. I don’t know if the Romans got the images from the Rotterdam supporters in the fountain on Hofplein, but I think they thought: it can be done that way.
The players with that scale, the proud trainer with his generous thanks to the legion, the happy mayor and the inevitable Lee Towers with his ‘You never walk alone‘. Later I saw him scurry away with his walker and thought: he indeed no longer walks alone.
Some of my Rotterdam friends were at the championship game in De Kuip and sent me the most exuberant videos. Also to bully. Was I jealous of Amsterdam? Not a second. Feyenoord is simply the more than justified champion. Again: on all fronts.
But it is still possible. A party without murder and fire. A party without fallen bus shelters, looted shops and beaten up cops. A party with more than a hundred thousand people together. With a beer. I think football was once meant to be that way. Play football for an autumn and a winter and see who has collected the most points in the spring. And the winner celebrates, gets the most money and is allowed to enter Europe. Amazing, right?
Just before this championship, there were still some Groningen people with smoke bombs in the back. Jet black smoke. The match was abandoned and everyone went home grumpy. The game has now played out just as grumpy. The nice thing was: nobody was interested in going on strike anymore. It was a party in Rotterdam.
On Thursday things went wrong in Alkmaar. On a video I saw a few hundred hooded nets breaking through a fence to beat up the supporters of West Ham United. I think it was only teenagers who had to run fast because otherwise they would come home too late and parents waved a house arrest. While I saw them act tough, I found them especially pathetic. I thought of Rotterdam. At the party. To however it is possible. No riots, no injuries, nothing.
What we have to? Don’t be afraid of hooligans anymore. We have to laugh at them. Find snow. Just like you have a soft pity for smokers in front of an office building. Oh gosh, I always think when I see how they are pulling the lung cancer out of their rods. I think football should be fun again. And we will no longer threaten players who change clubs. Cruyffie even did that.
I once started at Ajax as a sixteen-year-old on the F-side, which was then simply called Vak F. There, after a weekend of bonfire, we were addressed by Mr. Jaap van Praag, Michael’s father. He threatened to do away with the fifty-cent boy tickets if we screwed up again. There was more and more fighting. I soon had enough and left for an ordinary people’s stand. No sense in hassle.
And fifty years later, I’m still sitting in that grandstand. Never fought, never fought, never sung about Jews. Just with my son and my brother and my cousin. Watch football and have fun. Or go home grumpy because it doesn’t work. Like last year. That’s part of it.
Thirty-five years ago I drove with an old, mildly demented lady past De Meer, the former Ajax stadium where stacked sea containers formed large walls. The lady asked why that was. I explained to her that they did it to keep rival supporters apart. Otherwise they would fight. The lady looked at me in disbelief and asked me to repeat it one more time. Then she laughed and whispered, “You’re crazy!” I think about this so often. My mother was right.
A version of this article also appeared in the May 20, 2023 newspaper.