Football fever beats Dutch immigrants' estrangement

Soccer fever is apparently creating some unusual situations in the immigrant neighborhoods of the capital of the Netherlands, whose national team will play on Sunday in the World Cup Final in South Africa.

“On every important game the corner café fills up with tipsy White women in skimpy orange skirts and tank-tops over their burnt pink skin who come to watch the game,” observed Elektra Danielle Christodoulou, a resident of Bos en Lommer, a neighborhood with a large contingent of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants in Amsterdam’s west.

	Fans of the Dutch soccer team gather in Amsterdam to watch their team play against Uruguay in the World Cup on July 6, 2010.
	Photo by: AP

Across from the café is the Moroccan restaurant Marhaba. “The male clientele sits there having the usual tea, dividing their attention between the game on the restaurant’s TV set and the clients of the café, as women in Burkas pass them by,” added Christodoulou, the owner of a stall on the flea market on the Waterlooplein.

Her colleague on the market, Rob, has sold over 700 orange shirts in two days ahead of the World Cup Final, in which Holland will face Spain. More than 12 million Dutchmen – 75 percent of the population – are expected to watch the final on television.

Football is currently “a uniting factor in Holland,” according to Professor Paul Scheffer, an Amsterdam-based author and researcher on immigration trends in Holland.

Notwithstanding, he added, “there was some debate among players of Moroccan descent, as some favoured playing for the Moroccan national team and sharply criticized players like Khalid and Ibrahim Afellay, who choose the Dutch team to display their skills.”

Holland’s national team has several players of Moroccan descent, and from its ex-colonies Indonesia and Surinam. They are, according to Scheffer, “a source of tremendous pride for their respective communities,” In sports, he said, this surpassed any sense of estrangement the immigrant communities may have.

Serge Lipits, also from Bos en Lommer, says the “streets are full of orange confetti.” Recalling Holland’s game versus Uruguay last Tuesday and against Brazil on Friday, he said: “Whenever there’s a goal, cars horns are heard for two minutes straight” and "a booming thud comes from the houses – the muffled sounds of people screaming.”

Soccer, national pride and a sunny 25-degrees-Celsius weather, drew some 70,000 people on Tuesday to Amsterdam’s Museumplein to watch the game on giant screens. “There’s a different atmosphere on the streets, and sometimes it feels like this city has ground to a halt,” Lipitz added. The Final will be broadcast on giant screens to hundreds of thousands of people in various locales in large Dutch cities.

Ronny Naftaniel, director of the Hague-based Center for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI), noted that arranging public addresses or events during the World Cup month has ranged from “risky” - because if there’s a game no one will show up - to “impossible.”

He said he expected fans would vent their excitement after the game by boarding passing ships on the canals - regardless of the score.