There were even a couple of old geezers in the train from Milan to Rotterdam, who could still remember the club’s first national championship. That was in 1924. Feyenoord had only existed a mere 16 years. The club had been established in 1908 by a couple of youngsters, who were playing regularly on the square in front of the Wilhelminakerk in the Oranjeboomstraat right in the middle of the new workers quarter of Rotterdam-Zuid. Feijenoord had been the neighbourhood’s name, for centuries, even before there were houses or people there.

They gathered in a bar on the corner of the Persoonshaven and the Damstraat on July 19th 1908 and established a football club. It was called Wilhelmina, after the queen who had also given her name to the impressive church situated in their area. Since its establishment in Café De Vereeniging, owned by Jac. Keizer Hz., the club had changed its name a couple of times. In 1912 they finally chose Feijenoord, after the club’s place of birth, even though they had been playing in the Afrikaanderwiijk from the beginning. Sixteen years later the boys from the streets of the Island Feijenoord had become national football champions of the Netherlands.

More championships followed later, but that first one was the best of them all because the rolls had been reversed forever: the workers had beaten the bourgeois. Their club, their Feijenoord, from the heart of the people, was Holland’s best. That´s when the successtory began. The names of that first championship team would forever stay in their memories: Vermeulen, Notenboom, Van Dijke, Zuidam, R. Bul, Van der Velde, Petterson, Koonings, Pijl, J. Weber en De Zeeuw. Undoubtedly they knew the men on the bench too: Visser, Borremans and Van Heel.


Sorce: o.a. Feyenoord Compleet, Waanders Uitgevers / Mr. J. Oudenaarden