The Eredivisie, the Dutch league born from a charity match and a bedroom conference
Dutch football stayed stubbornly amateur until 1954, punishing players who took wages. Then exiled internationals beat France in a flood-relief game, a rebel professional league sprang up, and within two years the Netherlands had a national top flight in which three clubs would come to hoard almost every title.
From 1898 the Dutch championship was settled by play-offs among regional winners, and the national association, the KNVB, banned payment and suspended anyone caught taking a salary or transfer fee. Many national team players left to earn money abroad, mostly in France. After the North Sea flood of 1953, those exiles arranged a charity match against the French national side in Paris; the KNVB boycotted it, but the Dutch won 2–1 and the public glimpsed what professionals could do.
A breakaway professional body, the NBVB, launched its own league for 1954–55. On 3 July 1954 worried amateur club chairmen met the KNVB at what became known as the bedroom conference, and the association grudgingly accepted semi-professionalism. The two rival leagues ran eleven rounds before merging in November, and Willem II won the first combined competition. For 1956–57 regional leagues were scrapped, the eighteen strongest clubs formed the Eredivisie, meaning Honour Division, and Ajax took the first title.
Ajax still lead with 36 championships, ahead of PSV Eindhoven on 27 and Feyenoord on 16. Since 1965 only three titles have escaped that trio, going to AZ in 1981 and 2009 and to Twente in 2010, and the so-called Big Three are the only current clubs never relegated. Today 18 teams play each other home and away; the bottom two drop to the Eerste Divisie and the third-lowest enters play-offs.
Crowds have grown from just over 7,000 per game in 1990 to 18,010 in 2018–19, when Ajax averaged 52,987 and Excelsior 4,223. Sponsorship has been awkward: the lottery backing the league since 2005–06 was long kept out of its name because the government objected to another gambling sponsor after Holland Casino. In 2012 Rupert Murdoch bought 12 years of rights for €1 billion. UEFA rated it Europe's seventh-best league in 2024–25.
Source: Eredivisie
