The Future of Dutch Football – your thoughts…

i do think it is a blessing in disguise to not posses the greatest domestic league because it forces you to look for new talent within your coutry and gives you own lads a chance to prove yourself… in england how many english players play in the big four???…9? what concerns me is that the talent holland is exporting is not going to the elite clubs in europe at the same rate in did in the 90’s…landzaat to wigan… ooijer to blackburn… van der vaart to hamburg… these are mediocore clubs at best… however another thing that concerns me is that in the 90’s holland boasted all kinds of talent from big clubs and yet failed to make a single final despite showing in 4 semi final’s…whith euro 2008 coming i feel that a another semi final defeat is on the cards even though a single ball hasn’t been kicked for the tornament… the reason i think this is because the 4-3-3 is outdated… this system is less effective against skilled opponents then against less skilled opponents… for example… against portugal we played 4-3-3 and they played 4-5-1 thus overwhelming our midfield and cutting off our ball supply to the wingers and forwards… problem solved… during that game much much of the ball disribution was played at the back cause we couldn’t break the porks down in midfield casue we were outnumbered… against argentina how many real chances did we get in that game??? if you look at the teams that win they pack the midfield and have maybe 1 or 2 upfront but never three…

Posted from  Canada

i believe the 4-3-3 system is the best one, with 4-3-3 any other formation can be dominated in midfield, and the two wingers can pull defencses apart on wide so that there is more space in the middle.

i think van basten’s 4-3-3 does not work, sneijder at the back to provide long balls and cocu to do some high pressing (i think) cannot work. look at rikaard’s 4-3-3 in spain, last year for chelsea in england, lyon in france for 5 years!

saying dutch players dont play in big clubs is not totally right. the same name will be mentioned again… ruud at real… van bommel at barcelona… seedorf at milan… boularouz at chelsea!!

Dutch football is one containing the most tallented players, but the players always seems to be future greats. maybe it’s because the young lads are pushed to big competitions to early. look at messi it’s 2-3 years now that rikaard use him as a sub. he gives him time to develop his full strength in training before pushing to weekly matches…

There is one fact: Netherlands is a small and minor country with 16 millions of inhabitants. Big Clubs in Eredivise have low budget ,if you compare with the big countries.
I totally agreee with you. It will be impossible to repeat the famous Dutch years in the future.
In the future, you can only expect successes of individuals players and not the ones of Dutch clubs and the national elftal. Please concede that and not dream.
I totally support Van Basten against Davids. How can you select Davids if he does not get along with Van der Vaart and Sneijder? Davis is first a Surinam player. Read his Internet site “My country, Surinam”.

Posted from  France

van der saar at mu,makaay at bayern,robben at chelsea,van persie at arsenal,van bronckhorst at barca,kuijt at liverpool,etc.

the problem is that marco prefers players playing at home (especially at ajax or az – i like ajax but…)

maybe it would be better to play 4-2-3-1 like barca,france,etc,but it might easily transform into 4-3-3. i don’t see too much difference…

Posted from  Hungary

t be honest: before yesterday i thought this year ajax could be in the quarter final of the champions’league or even with luck in the semi final. stam,sneijder,huntelaar should have done it. maybe there is a mentality problem.
psv is weaker than last year and the year befor,so i don’t except anything. same with feyenoord. maybe alkmaar in the uefa cup?

Posted from  Hungary

yeah, me too, tought ajax had a good team and could do well this season in the champions league… hope they win the league though!!

Dutch club football will never be the same after ‘Bosman’. It would take a lot of luck to hold together a team with dutch players wich could win the championslegaeu.. one of the problems is that players leave for abroad after playing just 1 year in the dutch legaue…

Ajax yesterday was a disaster, they were far to arrogant and got what they deserved..but very bad for dutch football..

PSV and Feyenoord our both weakend on decisive positions, i wont be expecting much from them ..

AZ could be the big surprise this year, very good team, very good football (vanBasten told press prior to the WC that AZ played the kind of football he was hoping to play with Oranje..

greetz

Posted from  Netherlands

Jan, I can see you’re feeling a little pessimistic. Just hang on for the Euro qualifiers. Judge for yourself then. Dutch success doesn’t hinge on the success of Feyenoord, PSV and Ajax like it used to. Dutch players are in high demand abroad for a reason.

Keep the faith mate

Posted from  Canada

Jan,
A few points
I think every country goes through ups and downs when it comes to talent but a country like Holland is even more susceptible to ups and downs simply because of its relative size. Fifa has Holland in 6th but when you think of that and you think of the tiny country it is I think that is a heck of an accomplishment. Ahead of it there are countries like Brazil that has 186 Million people living in it and countries like England, France and Italy that are all around the 60 Million people mark. Holland has 16 Million…
The only reason in my opinion that it can compete is because the Dutch clubs have figured that in order to survive they needed to learn to take advantage of the transfer markets and for them that means selling players at a profit. To make money on a player you have to make him better and the result is that Holland’s clubs provide what in the opinion of many is among the best soccer education in the world. The first really well known one was Ajax but Feyenoord, AZ en PSV have also become very good. Many of the kids these academies pick up they pick up at a very young age and I think this infrastructure is what has kept Dutch soccer going on an international level.
Dutch club soccer will likely never have the impact internationally it had before the import rules were relaxed.
The Eredivisie is nothing but a development league at this point. Maybe that is a shame but on the other hand we now have the best players in the world regularly squaring of against each other in the PL. And Oranje will always be among the better countries in the world because the Dutch have learned that you can make money developing good players…

@jaap stam: I agree with you. I think that if we have a good defensive midfielder like Davids then we can use 4-3-3. I don’t know why our coaches(Advoocat, Marco) wasted talents like Makaay because he doesn’t suite the 4-3-3 system. If I were them, then I will use 4-2-2 to find a place for Makaay.

About Ajax, PSV, Feyenoord,I don’t expect much from them. But I don’t worry about the national team. Look at French, they went to the final last WorldCup although their league is the same as ours.

Posted from  Viet Nam

Hey, chinup mate. You’ve got plenty of talent coming through and one defeat in a farcical game certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. Sneijder, van der Vaart, Arjen Robben, Kuijt, Boulahrouz, Emmanuelson and of course Huntelaar, looks plenty promising to me. The team will mature and settle down cohesively once the qualifiers get underway..hope you didn’t mean van Persie when you talked about those non-world-class players though. As an Arsenal fan, I think he will really develop into one of the most feared attackers in a couple of years’ time. Time is on his side. After all, look at Bergkamp and Henry. At 21, Henry was a nobody who had massive talent and bags of pace butunfulfilled potential. Van Persie’s his equivalent–a raw unpolished diamond that at Arsenal, rest assured, will surely develop into a world-beater. Just take World Cup 2006 as a learning experience for the young lads and don’t read into it too seriously.

Posted from  Singapore

I think MVB has the gutts to kick a player out of his team.. many coaches don’t.

He knows that certain player is not playing up the expectation and not giving his best, so why keep him.

Many coaches dont have th gutts to not call the big names, so they called them, palyed and failed ..ie. Brazil in the WC.

Others like Erikson called players that warmed the bench to the WC becuase they are big names, the chemstry was zero and team failed pretty bad … Theo was called just to show that Eriskon has Gutts, but he knew that he will not play him.

I think that MVB is changing the whole system of Dutch soccer … it will take time, and I think he is doing great so far … maybe I disagree with some stuff, but we as fans should trust the manager ..like we trusted when he won the only international cup for Holland.

Posted from  United States

I’d like to go back to the original premises of the questions: what’s the outlook for Oranje? And what would be good?

Pro: For a country of 16 million the Dutch have and continue to produce a staggering amount of footballing talent. It goes up and down a bit – but each of teh top two teams in the world: Barca and Chelsea have Dutch players. And do a lot of other top teams.

The dutch youth leagues continue to produce lots and lots of good players. Seriously what other country has a better front line than Huntelaar, Van Persie and Robben?

Anti – Most of the star Dutch players are attackers, not as many prominent defenders and midfielders. The ball has to come from somewhere.

Pro: The dutch league is the best of any small country – with 4 decent sides (although Ajax choked).

Anti: The Premier League is getting stronger every year, it’s in English, the world language, and that means lots of cash from World Wide marketing. Spain too, with Spanish being another world wide language. They’re sucking up the good players. Italy is probably finished – who speaks Italian?

With only 4 good clubs in the Dutch league, that means the average Dutch team only plays 6 really tough games in the league annually. That’s only 6 tough games and 6 big draws. Not enough.

Possible solution: Merge with Belgium – very rich teams like Anderlecht, Brugge and Standard. They need more big draws too. You think they’d prefer to sell Ajax – Anderlecht rather than Anderlecht – Mechelen?

And if you’re even more aggresive pull in a few Danish and Scottish clubs as well: A North Sea league. Hell – play the championship on the Channel Islands – that’d be a fun weekend!

A richer league would keep a lot more Dutch players at home more competition – and more cash!

The talent is there – and so the competitiveness. Don’t despair!
Heck you should see my American dad’s face when they got crushed in the WC!

Posted from  United States

euro 88: he and the others won it. but what he did in italy 90?… and who missed the crucial penalty in the semi final of euro92?

the dutch soccer shouldn’t be changed – hiddink didn’t want it,rijkaard didn’t want it… and they are definitely greater coaches than marco. no place to any comparaison like compare an ant to a lion…

Posted from  Hungary

@samuel knights: good ideas,i agree with this big league:-)

Posted from  Hungary

For once in my soccer life I haven’t a clue. Now there’s an article advising that MvB will most likely never call RvN or Bommel again. Even van der Sar can’t quite grasp that.

If MvB is making positive changes with an eye to ‘08 and ‘10 we have no choice but to trust him – but if we fail to even make the quarters in ‘08 MvB should probably be sacked in order to give a new coach time to prepare for the ‘10 WC.

With the talent Holland produces, to have been denied so many times is damn near criminal. If MvB truly knows what he’s doing, we will probably recognize it within a year.

My bad – link to the aforementioned article:

http://www.wldcup.com/news/2006Aug/20060825_38182_world_soccer.html

The netherlands always has had incredible talent, but right now there are no players of the kaliber of a Johan Cruyff, Piet Keizer, Johan Neeskens, Arie Haan, Ruud Krol, Rob Rensenbrink, Johnnie Rep, Willem VAn Hanegem, Wim Jansen,FRNK Rijkaard,Sjaak Swart, and Wim Suurbier, all stars from when I was young, and Ajax rtuled the world. Another weakness is the fact that most players are very lazy, and don’t care much about repressenting their country. How attitudes have changed?
The talent is there, but we need another Rinus Michels, possibly one of the greatest soccer coaches in history.
Robert Cohn
Born in the Netherlands,
Atlanta, Georgia

Posted from  United States

First of all, thanks to all of the foreign fans and dutch expatriots etc. from canada / america for thinking with us.

My country seems to be in a freeze, an ice-age right now when it comes to football. My hopes are that we can compare this period with the 1980’s, from 1980 till 1986 all the dutch clubs and national teams failed utterly in international competition.

Especially the 11 year drought of not winning a Champions League or coming close to such a feat is bothering me very much. We have to work very quickly on rules to have each club team in CL or Uefa Cup playing with at least 6 homegrown players. When such rules would apply, we would rule the world again in my opinion.

Second; why the hell not form an atlantic league. Especially holland and portugal (altough not really best friends , and that’s an understatement) need each other. Belgian football is even much further away from anything classy then we are, so i don’t know why we should invite more then 2 of their teams.

Or national team will be allright again, i don’t worry about that. In a few years time all of our players will play with barca or real, or arsenal.

Hence my point, and the one that samuel knight made;

we NEED some foreign teams, so get over it when we would have to fly to matches, so be it.
Lets introduce Sporting, Benfica, Porto, Rangers, Celtic, Anderlecht, Brugge, and maybe even Steau Bucharest and Sparta Praag into the Dutch eredivisie.

We Dutch excell at organizing international events, so get started! Organize this Atlantic League from Amsterdam , a main office or something, and make our own league. Too bad for the last 10 teams in the eredivisie, they will have to deal with the lesser gods from the czechs, portugese, belgians, romanians, scottish, swedish etc.

A passionate Ajax Amsterdam fan.

Posted from  Netherlands

i am a great beleiver that Dutch football will flourish again.that Holland has not won any international trophy other than the Euro88 has been a shame for the game of football itself.Apart from Brazil, no other team produces such tallented players.i have been following Dutch football for three decades now and i feel that due to some unknown reasons,the oranje team had been ‘unfortunate’and covered with a ‘jinx’.i will be glad to be proven wrong.Also the Dutch players do not have the killer instinct to win vital games in the semis and finals.Hoping to be proved wrong in that point too.

Posted from  Bangladesh

If you’ve seen the Under 21 European Championships in 2007, you ‘ll know that the future is bright Oranje! They’ve won the tournament twice in a row (also in 2006) and with very different teams. All top players, like Affelay and Aisatti (both PSV Eindhoven), Emanuelson (Ajax), Vlaar (Feyenoord) and Jenner (AZ Alkmaar) were not even playing for vaious reasons. Add on the young players in the offical Dutch A team, like Van Persie, Robben, Huntelaar, etc. and you know all is going to be good again in the future…

Posted from  Netherlands

u ALL ARE SEEMING TO FORGET rYAN BABEL THE NEXT BIG THING AT LIVERPOOL HE HAS BEEN IMMENSE ALL SEASON WE WILL WIN THE LEAGUE NEXT SEASON
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted from  United Kingdom

Atlantic League wouldnt be a bad idea but how do we relegate teams and promote teams to that league.

first of all what teams do you want in that league:

1. Celtic
2. Glasgow Rangers
3. Dundee United
4. Benfica
5. Porto
6. Sporting Lissabon
7. PSV
8. Ajax
9. Feyenoord
10. AZ
11. Club Brugge
12. Anderlecht
13. Standard Luik
14. Vitória Guimarães
15. FC Twente
16. Heerenveen
17. Boavista
18. Vitória Setúbal

Then you have a decent league that could match with Priméra Division and Premier League.

But its just a dream. Cause there is no way we can do this.