Seventeen years ago, both teams finished with the same number of points: 48. Stormvogels Telstar – as the club is officially called – finished tenth, FC Emmen eleventh.
During those years, the first division still had a number of clubs that no longer exist, such as RBC Roosendaal, BV Veendam, Haarlem and AGOVV. “In those years you didn’t have any young teams from Ajax, PSV, FC Utrecht and AZ,” Sebastiaan knows. “My wife is a supporter of Heracles Almelo, so I went to Jong AZ last year. The atmosphere there is a bit less.”
Although Sebastiaan no longer comes to Telstar that often, he can still be found regularly in other football stadiums and at all kinds of amateur clubs. He’s a real one groundhopper, as you call it. At the beginning of this month, he attended matches in the Regionallia Nord and West, the fourth highest level in Germany, and in May he attended a Malaga CF match in Spain.
“I attend a lot of matches, yes,” he says with a sense of understatement. “But it is a bit less than before, now that I have children. My eldest plays handball, my youngest is into kickboxing. So it is very nice to be there too.”