Rotterdam’s football stadium began as one man’s shout in the night, survived a war and two plans to knock it down, and still makes visitors feel they are in a theatre. De Kuip, the tub, is the best argument Dutch football has for keeping old things.
A shout in the night
Every good stadium story needs a founding myth. De Kuip has one, and it comes with its own sound effect. The stadium’s official history says that in 1931 Feyenoord’s chairman, Leen van Zandvliet, dreamed up a stadium and woke up calling out “Ik heb het, ik heb het!”, which means “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” It is a lovely story. It is also the sort of story that clubs tell about themselves, and the history is honest enough to admit that the dream had a public side too. Van Zandvliet talked about a stadium for 60,000 to 75,000 people in an interview with the NRC on 20 April 1931, so the idea was out in the newspapers well before a single pile went into the ground.
What he wanted was not modest, and it helps to know where Feyenoord were starting from. The Canon van Nederland entry on De Kuip tells the club’s early story briskly. It began in 1908 as a club called Wilhelmina, whose players changed in the back room of a sweet shop on Paul Krugerstraat, and it took the name Feijenoord in 1912. Its ground on the Kromme Zandweg held about 12,000 people. That was too small for big games, so the important matches went to Het Kasteel, the home of their neighbours Sparta. A club that had won the national title in 1924 was borrowing a rival’s house for its best nights. You can see why a chairman might dream about something bigger.
The members had to agree first, and they did, though not unanimously. On 21 March 1934, the official history records, they voted 127 to 28 to go ahead. Twenty-eight people thought it was a bad idea, and every big project needs its doubters. They would have plenty to point at in the years that followed. The site, the Canon says, was in the Varkenoordse polder, and the land came through the businessman D.G. van Beuningen. The planned capacity in the Canon is 65,000, which sits inside the chairman’s dream of 60,000 to 75,000. Ambition had come down a little to meet reality, as it usually does.
The architects who went to Highbury
The club did not hire a stadium specialist. It hired the architects Brinkman and Van der Vlugt, who were invited in March 1934, according to the official history. They were the firm behind the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam, one of the great buildings of Dutch modernism, and that detail matters later in the story. In May 1934 they went on study trips to look at other grounds. The one that made the biggest impression was Arsenal’s Highbury, with its two-tier stand from 1932. So one of the most Dutch buildings in Dutch football has a little bit of north London in its bones.
What they built was a bowl of steel. The steelwork was done by the firm Braat, and the official history notes a nice practical touch: the buffets were built into the spaces between the steel frames, so the structure itself made room for the beer and the snacks. Steel was cheap in those years. Joke Reichardt, writing in NRC in 2018, points out that the crisis of the 1930s made steel affordable, which is one of history’s odder gifts to football. A depression that ruined many lives also gave Rotterdam its stadium at a good price.
The shape is the thing people remember. The Architectuurgids gives the numbers. The stadium is an ellipse 197.38 metres by 161.38 metres, with a circumference of 600 metres and 22 external stairwells. Those stairwells are on the outside, so the inside can be one clean sweep of seats. Reichardt explains the real trick. The upper tier hangs out over the lower one with no columns in the way, and she quotes Brinkman’s own comparison: it is “gelijk een balcon in een schouwburg”, like a balcony in a theatre. The second ring is slightly steeper than the first, and the pitch was raised, so everyone looks down onto the game as if it were a stage. There were wooden benches, and the stadium held more than 61,000 people, about a third of them standing.
That theatre image is worth holding on to. Many grounds of the 1930s were built like sheds, with a stand on each side and gaps at the corners. De Kuip was built like an auditorium. It is round, it has no pillars, and the crowd surrounds the play. The nickname, the tub, tells you how it feels. You are inside something.
Built in ten months, tested by jumping
The speed of the building is startling. According to the official history, the stadium was finished on 23 July 1936, ten months after the first pile was driven in by Puck van Heel. Ten months. Modern stadiums take longer than that just to get through planning.
Then came one of the best stories in the whole history of stadium building. The council’s access roads were not ready, so the stadium could not open straight away. Instead, in the autumn of 1936, the club ran a test. According to the official history, 1,500 marines and unemployed men were brought in and told through a megaphone to jump up and down on the stands. Their reward was a borrel, a drink, and a cigar. It is hard to think of a more Dutch piece of engineering. No computer models, no safety consultants with clipboards, just fifteen hundred men bouncing on a steel balcony while someone shouts at them through a megaphone, and then a drink. The stands held.
There is a sad note too. Leendert van der Vlugt, one of the two architects, did not live to see the opening. Reichardt records that he died on 25 April 1936, before the stadium was finished. When Le Corbusier wrote about him afterwards, she says, he dwelt on the Van Nelle factory. That has been De Kuip’s fate in the architecture books ever since: it is the great building that lives in the shadow of an even more famous one by the same hands. Football fans may not mind. They got the stadium, and the architects got the factory.
The opening, and the rivalry with Amsterdam
De Kuip opened on 27 March 1937. The official history gives the match as Feyenoord 5, Beerschot 2, in front of 40,000 people. A few weeks later, on 2 May 1937, the Netherlands beat Belgium 1-0 there. From the very start the stadium was meant for the national team as well as the club, and that brought out an old rivalry.
Reichardt tells what happened next. After De Kuip opened, Amsterdam’s Olympic Stadium was enlarged to 65,000, so that internationals could be shared between the two cities. Rotterdam had built something big, and Amsterdam would not be left behind. Anyone who knows anything about Dutch football will recognise the feeling. The rivalry between the two cities is older than either stadium, and it has never needed much excuse.
The official history counts 125 matches of the Netherlands national team played at De Kuip. Some of those players have their own stories on this site, including Marco van Basten, and the strange story of how the Dutch side of the 1990s had so much talent and won so little. De Kuip saw a lot of that brilliance, and a fair amount of the disappointment as well.
The first threat: steel for a war
The doubters who voted against in 1934 might have felt they had a point quite soon. The official history lists three times when the stadium was threatened with demolition, and the first came in 1941, during the German occupation, when the steel was wanted for the war industry. A stadium made of cheap steel had become, in wartime, a pile of valuable steel. It survived. The history does not dwell on how, and I will not invent the details. What matters is that the tub was still standing when the war ended.
Nights of European football
If De Kuip has a claim to greatness beyond its shape, it is the nights. The official history says the stadium has hosted ten finals of the three old European club competitions, the European Cup, the Cup Winners’ Cup and the UEFA Cup. That is a remarkable number for a single ground, and it shows how much UEFA trusted the place. A round bowl with no pillars and a crowd right on top of the pitch is a good place to hold a final.
Feyenoord had their own great night in 1970. The Canon van Nederland records that they became the first Dutch club to win the European Cup, and it names some of the players: Moulijn, Pieters Graafland, Van Hanegem and Kindvall. There is a glass wall in the stadium by the artist Cor Kraat, Reichardt notes, which marks the European Cup and the world cup the club won. Glass, steel, and silverware: the building and the club’s memory sit in the same material.
The best home night of all might be 8 May 2002. That evening, as UEFA’s match report puts it, Feyenoord “lifted the 31st UEFA Cup at their home Feijenoord Stadion in Rotterdam” by beating Borussia Dortmund 3-2. Playing a European final in your own stadium is the kind of luck that most clubs never get. The report describes “the sea of red and white” that Dortmund faced. Jürgen Kohler, in his last senior match before retirement, was sent off in the first half for pulling back Jon Dahl Tomasson. Pierre van Hooijdonk scored the penalty and then a curling free-kick, his eighth goal of the tournament. Dortmund scored twice through Márcio Amoroso and Jan Koller, but Tomasson’s goal in between was enough. At the end, the report says, “Rotterdam erupted in an explosion of red-and-white joy.” UEFA’s own later summary puts the penalty at 33 minutes while the match report has the sending-off on 31 minutes and the penalty after it, so the exact minute depends on which UEFA page you read. The joke in that later summary is a good one: “good things really do come those who wait”, since Feyenoord had waited 28 years for another European trophy.
Two years earlier, De Kuip had held the biggest international match in its history. On 2 July 2000 the final of the European Championship was played in Rotterdam. UEFA’s report tells it well. Italy led through Marco Delvecchio’s volley on 55 minutes and were seconds from winning. Then Sylvain Wiltord scored in the fourth minute of injury time, and in extra time David Trezeguet, who had come off the bench, crashed in a golden goal from Robert Pirès’s cut-back. France became the first world champions to win the European title as well. Italy, the report says, were left “crestfallen”. A balcony in a theatre is a good place to watch a tragedy, and that night it staged one.
Not every big crowd at De Kuip has even needed a match. The official history says that in 1993 more than 30,000 people went to the stadium to watch Feyenoord’s title-deciding game in Groningen on a big screen. Think about that. Thirty thousand people went to a stadium to watch their team play somewhere else. It says a lot about what the place had come to mean. People did not go there only for the football. They went there because that is where Feyenoord fans go.
Bob Dylan and the music
The stadium has also had a second life as a concert venue. The official history says the first concert was Bob Dylan in 1978, in front of 52,000 people. It is a nice thought that the first big gig in a stadium shaped like a theatre was given by a man who hardly ever plays to the crowd. Later, during the renovation of the 1990s, the history notes that Pink Floyd played there while the builders were at work. Few stadiums can say they were half a building site when Pink Floyd came to town.
Two more threats, and a rescue
The second threat came from ambition. The official history says that Rotterdam’s bid for the 1992 Olympic Games, made in 1984, would have meant the end of De Kuip. The bid did not succeed, and the stadium stayed. The third threat was more dangerous because it came from inside the building. In the early 1990s, the history says, there was concrete rot.
Reichardt quotes a strong phrase from the writers Haagsma and De Haan, who described the neglect of the stadium as “gifmoord”, a poisoning. It is a harsh word, but she shows what they meant. In the 1980s, the glass between the two rings, which had given the stadium its light, was replaced with corrugated sheet and Trespa panels. A modernist building was slowly being covered up. Nobody tore it down. It was just allowed to get worse.
The rescue came in 1994. The official history says the renovated stadium reopened on Wednesday 16 November 1994, after eight months of work, and that it was opened by Prince Willem-Alexander before a match between the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. The work cost 120 million guilders. It added the Maasgebouw, a new building, along with 40 business units and 1,200 business seats. The capacity became 47,500, with more than 40,000 under cover, and the roof now covers 85 per cent of the spectators. Perhaps the most important change is a small one. The fences around the pitch were replaced with a moat three metres wide. Where a fence had stood, De Kuip chose a ditch.
There is a puzzle in the numbers, and it is worth being honest about it. The Architectuurgids credits the renovation to Zwarts & Jansma in 1993 and 1994, but gives the cost as €0.54 million, which does not fit at all with the 120 million guilders in the club’s own history. I cannot tell you which is right, or what the smaller figure is measuring. The Architectuurgids also lists a capacity of 51,000, against the 47,500 given by the club for the reopening. Stadium capacities change all the time, as seats are added and rules change, so the two figures may simply come from different years. But they do not agree, and a reader deserves to know that.
The rescue was also a recognition. The Canon van Nederland says De Kuip has been a municipal monument since 1991. So by the time the builders arrived, the city had already decided that the tub was part of its heritage, not just a place to play football.
The plans that came and went
Since then, the question of what to do with De Kuip has never really gone away. Reichardt’s article was written in 2018, at the time of the Feyenoord City plan, which proposed a new stadium of 63,000 seats at a cost of €444 million. The Architectuurgids notes that an earlier plan by OMA fell through, and that the latest plan is a renovation by Powerhouse Company in 2025. I will not guess at how that story ends. De Kuip has been sentenced to death three times already, and it is still there. It would be a brave writer who called the result in advance.
What the history does show is a pattern. Each time someone has wanted to replace the stadium, the building has had more friends than expected. It may be the shape. It may be the memories.
A stadium compared with its neighbours
It is useful to compare De Kuip with some of the newer grounds on this site. The BayArena in Leverkusen is a club ground that has been rebuilt and enlarged step by step, and it works well. But it was not designed as one idea. De Kuip was. It was planned as a single bowl by architects who had just built one of the most famous factories in Europe, and it still reads as one building. The new stadiums of the last thirty years are often bigger and almost always more comfortable. Few of them have a founding myth about a chairman shouting in his sleep, or a test run with fifteen hundred jumping men and a cigar each.
That is the case for De Kuip, really. It is not the biggest stadium in Europe, or the newest, or the most comfortable. It is a building with a clear idea behind it, a balcony in a theatre, and it has kept that idea through a war, a decline and a rescue.
What the tub means
Stand on the outside and you see the stairwells, the steel and the ellipse. Go inside and you see the thing the architects were after: a crowd wrapped round a stage, with nothing in the way. The Canon van Nederland calls it, simply, Stadion Feijenoord, or De Kuip. Most people only use the second name.
The stadium has seen Feyenoord win in Europe at home, France win a European title in the last minutes, and Bob Dylan play to 52,000 people. It has seen thirty thousand people come to watch a screen. It has been threatened with the scrap heap for its steel, with the bulldozer for an Olympic bid, and with slow ruin from its own concrete. Each time it came through. The 28 members who voted no in 1934 were not exactly wrong. Building a steel bowl in a polder in the middle of a depression was a gamble. But it was the right gamble, and Rotterdam has been glad of it for nearly ninety years.
Van Zandvliet woke up shouting that he had got it. He had.
