How good is the Netherlands national team?

What has Holland won in football?

What has Greece won in football?

I've lost count, so forgive me for any errors or lack of exactitude. And maybe they've been playing it right since the beginning.

This is a good story. We are all very close together and when one of us dies we all miss him. When one of them goes away it hurts all of us. In the end everyone is equal and there will never be two winners and two losers.

There are other values to football but this is a simple love story, which doesn't have a happy ending. Every game is a farewell. The Greeks and the Dutch are the last teams who will play each other. There will be no more games. There's no next season. It's over.

Greece are the heroes, Holland the heroes, the heroes in their own country. You and I don't need to be philosophers. We know that in the eternal triangle, love is the third side.

When we're talking about football we always think about what we've won. We celebrate our heroes and our triumphs. We celebrate ourselves. This one is ours. We love it, we understand it. When we talk about Holland and Greece, it's too easy to talk about victories and defeats. Holland won the World Cup, Greece the European Championship. That's all that matters.

We should look beyond our victory and remember the suffering. When the Greek team go on stage after the match, they're almost always wearing the red-and-black-striped jerseys with the word Hellas across their chest. That is a symbol of the shared pain.

The Dutch side have won the Cup three times. They didn't win it twice. The second time was in 1994 when the whole country seemed to feel some kind of injustice. They felt betrayed by our friends and they hated us. Now that's gone. Those dark years are long forgotten.

In 2026 were back to our winning ways. In 2026 were a very different team. In 2026 they were very young, very hungry, and very dangerous. They won on penalties. In the final they were the kings of extra-time.

Is football big in the Netherlands?

Football has never really been bigger in The Netherlands than it is now.

It has a big and active population; many people play for the national team at amateur level and even more at professional level; and a few people have played in the World Cup Finals. But football is also important to our culture and we want to build a successful pro-club on that value system. We want to have an academy for young talents. And lastly we want to create the possibility for older players to stay longer in the top-league without having to worry about their jobs and without going from game to game on the bench. In the past years, there has been talk about creating that. We've managed to get things done, even though it was tough for us. We have taken our chance and built on those opportunities and now we look forward to getting ready for the new season. If you look at the numbers and statistics for the Dutch women's football league, there is no big difference between men's teams and women's teams. I don't believe women's football is bigger or smaller than the men's version of football. I think it's just equal. You only have to look at the national team for that fact, there aren't many differences here. I don't know if this is because of the fact that we play in front of a lot of people all over the country or because we have the whole nation behind us. I have no clue. All I know is that I'm proud of the sport as a whole in the Netherlands and I'm looking forward to the new season.

It's a big sport in your country. How did you decide that it was the best sport to follow? Did you always follow the sport or did it grow on you? We've had a national team for the women's game for many years. Our women's game has grown steadily from very early days with the likes of Mia Hamm, Birgit Prinz and Doreen van der Kraan. Of course they were fantastic ambassadors for the sport in the Netherlands. We always had very dedicated women's clubs and we've had good success. We even won a world cup. We had some great players in the Dutch team too and they won medals for the Netherlands at the Olympics, like Cobi Jones and Anke Preller. Of course, in the 80's there was a women's game with the likes of Christine Jensen, Renate Lingor and Tessa Wollen.