On a crisp, sun-kissed spring evening in Alkmaar, what defences remained for AZ to fight off the remorseless collapse that had been toppling Dutch teams in Europe this season finally crumbled. AZ had mounted something of a valiant performance in the second leg against Shakhtar Donetsk, drawing 2-2, having lost 3-0 in Kraków. But it was over; there had been six Dutch sides playing European football at the start of the 2025-26 season, and now there were none.
This was not the worst performance by Eredivisie sides in Europe across a whole season – that unfortunate accolade goes to the 2017-18 campaign. UEFA judges a country’s overall performance in European competition using a coefficient, with points awarded to each team for wins, draws and competition progression. The overall tally is then divided by the number of teams from a single nation, and then there it is: you have your national coefficient points tally. Using the brutal combination of bureaucracy and maths that only sport can create, we can see that during the 2017-18 season Dutch teams lost a combined 66.7% of their main-stage European games, for a coefficient score of 2.9. This felt like a nadir at the time; the point at which Dutch football, certainly as an elite proposition, had been stamped on like a plastic tulip beneath a horde of tourists in mid-June Amsterdam.
But this season’s performances are worse in many ways. As European football continues to enlarge, stretched like a too-small shirt over UEFA’s bloated stomach, more Dutch teams entered this season’s various competitions, and nearly all of them failed badly. Ajax, four-time European champions, finished 33rd out of 36 teams in the Champions League phase, conceding a shocking 21 goals in eight games. PSV barely fared much better, finishing 28th with just two more points. In the Europa League, Go Ahead Eagles, Feyenoord and FC Utrecht placed 28th, 29th and 34th out of 36. The only redeemable performance was the aforementioned AZ reaching the quarter-final of the Conference League. All in, Dutch teams lost 61.5% of their main-stage games in European competition this season.
Of course, Dutch football has long struggled to compete with the financial might of Europe’s top five leagues. In the 21stcentury, only one Dutch team has won a European trophy, Feyenoord’s 2002 UEFA Cup win, and only twice has any Eredivisie team made it to the Champions League semi-finals: PSV in 2004-5 and Ajax in 2018-19.
So if these European struggles are nothing new, why all the doom and gloom at a season that isn’t even statistically their worst? Well, this year’s struggles resulted in the Netherlands dropping a place in the overall coefficient ranking below Portugal, meaning that from 2027, the Eredivisie will lose an automatic Champions League spot. Based on relatively good results in the five seasons preceding the current one, the top-two teams in the Dutch league qualified for next year’s Champions League, but after next year, only the league winner qualifies directly.
Beyond that, though, this season’s performance suggests a proud, once revolutionary football culture collapsing beneath the weight of this new, expanded version of European competition. There are more European games to be played and trophies to be won than at any other period in football’s history. So logically, that should mean that Dutch teams and fans have more of a chance for success. Instead, what has been exposed is the hollowness of Dutch football: the lack of depth, the lack of quality, and the inability to compete with other nations, even smaller ones.
There is nowhere for Dutch football to hide anymore; more and more games, more and more losses, more and more evidence that the Eredivisie’s recent rise was thinner than it looked. The expanded competitions were supposed to offer Dutch clubs more routes to relevance. This season, they offered only more ways to be exposed.
Written by James Turrell