“Feyenoord, wat gaan we doen vandaag” banner

Feyenoord, Feyenoord, wat gaan we doen vandaag?
Wij gaan winnen! Alleen met hoeveel is de vraag?

(“Feyenoord, Feyenoord, what shall we do today?
We will win! Only by how much is the question?”)

On May 14, 2023, Feyenoord – one of the largest soccer clubs in the Netherlands – won the national championship for the first time in six years. Supporters were confident that their team would win the decisive match, and so the game was to be festively opened with the largest Dutch banner ever: 11,000 square meters, 540 meters long.

Supporters associations FSV De Feijenoorder, FRFC1908, and De Noordzijde joined forces and, with the efforts of hundreds of volunteers, realized an impressive banner featuring a few lines from a club anthem plus a timeline of all the previous years in which the club won the highest Dutch soccer competition.

Rotterdam does not have an obvious “city typeface” like rival AFC Ajax who won their matches dressed in Kurversbrug for a long time; nor do they have a relationship with a local type designer like PSV, who hired local typedesigner (and fan) Pieter van Rosmalen to update the club logo and design a set of custom typefaces. The giant banner would of course have been a fantastic start to a city–typedesigner–football club triangular relationship. WT Skrappa by Wisetype would surely have worked really well on this canvas; or what about all letters holding hands with Westenwind by Olga Umpeleva, a fresh resident of the port city.

Perhaps it was all a bit short notice for such an adventure. In this case, the supporter associations opted for a safe choice with Times. Nothing adventurous, but certainly a suitable choice for a club that values working hard without complaining.

You may notice that while the club is called Feyenoord, one of the associations is called “De Feijenoorder” – with an ij instead of a y. Both are used on the stadium signs. The club Feyenoord is rooted in the Feijenoord neighborhood.