The national sport of the Netherlands is football in everyday life and speed skating in national myth; no Dutch law makes either official. Football is the country's most popular sport: the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB), founded in 1889, has more than 1.2 million members, the largest sports body in the country, and 66% of Dutch people said they planned to follow Euro 2024. Speed skating is where the Dutch win, with 146 of the country's 167 Winter Olympic medals. Both stories begin with the same man, Pim Mulier, who founded the first Dutch football club in Haarlem in 1879 and skated the eleven Frisian cities in 1890. The sections below follow football from that Haarlem club to the present, then return to the ice.
Pim Mulier and the Haarlem Club of 1879
Football reached the Netherlands through a schoolboy. Willem Johan Herman "Pim" Mulier (1865–1954) was 14 when he co-founded the Haarlemsche Football Club in 1879, the oldest club still in existence in the country and now known as Koninklijke HFC. Mulier was the founding figure of Dutch sport generally: he set up the first tennis club in 1884, organised the first athletics meeting in 1886, introduced bandy with Charles Goodman Tebbutt in 1891 and served as president of the International Skating Union from 1892 to 1895.
Clubs spread quickly in the 1880s and 1890s. Sparta Rotterdam, the oldest professional club in the Netherlands, dates from 1888. Ajax followed in Amsterdam in 1900, Feyenoord in Rotterdam in 1908 and PSV, the works club of the Philips company in Eindhoven, in 1913. Between them these cities set the map of Dutch football that still holds: Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Eindhoven against everyone else.
The KNVB of 1889 and Three Olympic Bronzes, 1908–1920
Mulier also founded the national body. The Dutch Football and Athletics Association was set up in 1889; athletics was soon dropped, to Mulier's regret, and the football side became today's KNVB, which in 1904 was one of the seven founding members of FIFA alongside Belgium, Denmark, France, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Its headquarters are now in Zeist, in the centre of the country.
The amateur national team did well early. At the 1908 Olympics in London it lost to Great Britain in the semi-final and beat Sweden 2–0 for bronze. It took bronze again in Stockholm in 1912, after losing to Denmark, and in Antwerp in 1920, after losing to Belgium. In 1924 in Paris it reached the semi-final and lost 2–1 to Uruguay. The Netherlands skipped the first World Cup in 1930 because of the cost of travelling to South America, then went out in the first round in 1934 and 1938. For the next three decades the team qualified for nothing except the 1948 and 1952 Olympics.
August 1954: Professional Football and the First Eredivisie
The KNVB held out against professionalism for decades, declaring in 1909 that it would fight it "by all means necessary". The break came in 1954, when a rebel Dutch Professional Football Association (NBVB) started its own league. Its first match, between Alkmaar '54 and SC Venlo, was played on 14 August 1954. Within three months the two bodies merged, and in 1956 the KNVB scrapped regional leagues and launched the Eredivisie, a single national top division of 18 clubs. Ajax won the first title.
Since 1965 the three big clubs have won all but three titles (AZ in 1981 and 2009, Twente in 2010). Ajax lead the roll with 36 national championships, PSV have 27 and Feyenoord 16. Crowds grew late: average league attendance was just over 7,000 in 1990 but had reached 18,010 by 2018–19, helped by new grounds such as the Amsterdam ArenA, opened in 1996 and renamed the Johan Cruijff Arena in 2018.
Feyenoord in 1970, Ajax from 1971 to 1973, and Total Football
The golden era began in Rotterdam. On 6 May 1970 at the San Siro in Milan, Feyenoord beat Celtic 2–1 after extra time, Ove Kindvall scoring three minutes from the end, to become the first Dutch club to win the European Cup. That September they beat Estudiantes of Argentina 1–0 at De Kuip, after a 2–2 draw in Buenos Aires, to win the Intercontinental Cup.
Ajax went further. Rinus Michels, appointed coach in 1965, built a side around Johan Cruyff (1947–2016), who had debuted a year earlier. Their system, totaalvoetbal, asked outfield players to swap positions freely and press as a unit. Ajax beat Panathinaikos 2–0 at Wembley in the 1971 European Cup final; under the Romanian coach Ștefan Kovács they then won the 1972 final and a treble of European Cup, league and KNVB Cup, and the 1973 final, the first club to win three European Cups in a row since Real Madrid in the 1950s.
Michels and Cruyff took the method to the national team. At the 1974 World Cup in West Germany, the Netherlands beat Brazil and Argentina, then led the final in Munich through Johan Neeskens's penalty before a German player had touched the ball, only to lose 2–1. Four years later in Argentina they lost a second final, to the hosts. Brazil's 1970 captain Carlos Alberto later said the 1974 Dutch team was the only one he had seen that did things differently.
Munich 1988 and Enschede 2017: Two European Titles
The first major trophy for the national team came at Euro 1988 in West Germany, with Michels back in charge. Marco van Basten scored a hat-trick against England and the late winner against the hosts in the semi-final. In the final at Munich's Olympiastadion on 25 June 1988, in front of 72,308 spectators, Ruud Gullit headed the first goal and Van Basten volleyed the second from a tight angle to beat the Soviet Union 2–0.
The defence of that title ended in Sweden at Euro 1992, when Denmark's Peter Schmeichel saved Van Basten's kick in the semi-final shootout; an ankle injury soon ended Van Basten's career, and he retired at 30 in 1995. That same year Ajax, with a young side built largely from its own academy, beat Milan in the Champions League final in Vienna and then won the Intercontinental Cup, the last time a Dutch club was champion of Europe.
The men have come close since without winning again: semi-finals at the 1998 World Cup, Euro 2000, Euro 2004 and Euro 2024, and a third World Cup final in 2010 in Johannesburg, lost 1–0 to Spain after Andrés Iniesta scored in extra time. The women did win. Hosting Women's Euro 2017, the Netherlands beat Denmark 4–2 in the final at De Grolsch Veste in Enschede on 6 August 2017, and two years later reached the Women's World Cup final. Only the Netherlands and Germany have won both the men's and the women's European Championship, and more Dutch women play football than any other sport.
Frozen Canals: Speed Skating and the Elfstedentocht since 1909
Football owns the calendar, but skating owns the Dutch imagination. In 1890 Mulier skated past all eleven historic cities of Friesland and designed a medal for the feat, and in 1909 the first organised Elfstedentocht was held with 22 men. The route runs almost 200 km on natural ice from Leeuwarden through Sneek, IJlst, Sloten, Stavoren, Hindeloopen, Workum, Bolsward, Harlingen, Franeker and Dokkum and back to Leeuwarden. It can only be run when the ice is at least 15 cm thick along the whole course, and is then announced at 48 hours' notice. The 1940 race, three months before the German invasion, drew more than 3,000 starters and filled the front pages.
Warmer winters have made the tour rare: it has been held only three times in the past 50 years, in 1985, 1986 and 1997, and is described as being in danger of extinction from climate change. Competition has moved indoors. Thialf in Heerenveen, an outdoor rink from 1967 and covered since 1986, hosts two World Cup meetings a year and will stage long-track skating at the 2030 Winter Olympics. At Sochi in 2014 the Netherlands won 23 of the 36 speed skating medals, including eight of the twelve golds and four podium sweeps. Ireen Wüst (born 1986) won gold at five consecutive Winter Games from 2006, and Sven Kramer (born 1986) won the Olympic 5,000 m in 2010, 2014 and 2018 and a record nine world allround titles.
Korfball, Amsterdam 1902: The Dutch Game Built for Mixed Teams
One more sport has a claim, because it was invented in the Netherlands. In 1901 the schoolteacher Nico Broekhuysen went on a gymnastics course at Nääs in Sweden and learned ringboll, a game in which players threw a ball through a ring on a 3-metre pole. Back in Amsterdam he swapped the ring for a basket, so it was easier to see whether a point had been scored, and simplified the rules for his pupils. The result, korfball, appeared in 1902. Each team has four women and four men, and the netless basket sits on a 3.5 m pole. It has spread abroad, but at home it remains a club sport, far smaller than football.
1.2 Million Members: Dutch Football after the 2026 World Cup
Today the KNVB runs a five-level pyramid from the Eredivisie through the Eerste Divisie and Tweede Divisie to the amateur Derde Divisie and Hoofdklasse, plus the KNVB Cup. Its 1.2 million members make it bigger than any other sports association in the country.
The men's team had a sharp reminder of football's ups and downs in 2026. Having topped their World Cup group with seven points, they lost to Morocco on penalties in the round of 32, their earliest World Cup exit. Ronald Koeman resigned the next day, and in August 2026 the KNVB appointed Xavi on a four-year contract, the first foreign coach of the Netherlands since 1978. Dutch clubs still carry the old reputation for youth development, and the Ajax academy remains the model. To place these teams on the map, read our guide to the geography of the Netherlands, meet Cruyff's compatriots among the famous people from the Netherlands, or see how Denmark, beaten in that 2017 final, splits its affection between two games in the national sport of Denmark.