“Get in There”: A Dutch Soccer Fan Coaches KC’s Football Faithful
Kansas City Chiefs fans are Guinness World Record loud. At a home game against New England in 2014, football faithful yelling in unison at the top of their lungs reached a decibel level as loud as a jet engine from 100 feet away.
Sure, Sporting KC and the Kansas City Current have their moments of measured fan mania. But Chiefs fans operate at a different level: Tailgating troopers, visiting team taunters, cheered up and beered up by gametime. Chief’s fans are proud hometown, hero-happy, high-fivers while watching their boys beat down on whoever dares enter their domain.
All that and a bag of chips got nothing on World Cup soccer fans, they say. Talk about amped up. You’ve seen them on TV. Rowdy and unruly at times. We Chiefs fans get it. We respect their dedication, their emotion, their passion for their team, their hunger for winning along with their crazy getups.
Now we get to mix it up with them this summer. Those 650,000-strong mad-for-the game all-in soccer fans are coming to our same loud-and-proud stadium to play six huge world-best matches. It’ll be the Super Bowl on steroids every game.
“Chiefs football games are a blast,” Dutch soccer fan Bas Rol told KCM magazine. He’s a 43-year-old finance guy for the Virgin Music Group and a former fashion model married to a Kansas City girl since 2011. They lived briefly in Kansas City before moving back to his hometown, Amsterdam. “Her family are big Chiefs fans. I spent many weekends watching the Chiefs games with my father- and brothers-in-law,” says Rol.
Rol will stay in Amsterdam for the 2026 World Cup tournament. The Netherlands play Tunisia at Arrowhead on June 25th. For him, the run up to any big World Cup soccer match starts the week before. “I get quite nervous,” he says. “Everything is about the game. It’s about getting ready, watching pregame shows and gearing up in orange (the team’s colors).”
Dutch soccer matches often feel like a mix between soccer and a national holiday—closer to a street festival than a sporting event, he says. Tens of thousands of Dutch fans travel together, turning foreign cities into temporary Dutch festivals.
Links Rechts (Left Right), a song by the Dutch group Snollebollekes, became an unofficial Dutch team anthem in 2024. Crowds of orange-clad fans—the “oranjefans,” thousands together in the stadium or out in the streets before a match—create a sea of orange moving side-to-side, left to right. “It’s kind of treacherous in the stands, but people do it anyway,” he says. “It’s an upbeat song, and then it breaks into a chorus where you lock arms with complete strangers and just go left, left, left, left, right, right, right, right. It’s just happy-go-lucky fun.”
Fans at European soccer games have been brawling since medieval times. But Dutch fans are much more mellow, he says—orderly, joyful, humor over aggression, and more family-oriented. He acknowledges that the game has gotten a bad rap “but it’s mainly club related,” he says. “Those are more hardcore fans. Every week, they stand in the stands, all dressed in black. They don’t care. It’s a completely different set of fans.”
During a match once his team gets the first goal, he says he definitely doesn’t hold back. “There’s jumping, there’s screaming, there’s hugging and high-fiving strangers. Not much different than a Kansas City Chiefs game, right?”
His advice for Kansas Citians? “Join them. If you see a big parade of Dutch people going left, left, right, right, get in there. Even if you don’t speak Dutch, you will know quick enough which direction you need to go.”
