Why Ajax and so many Dutch clubs have names from Greek myth

Tales about the gods and monsters of Greek and Roman mythology have been told for millennia and continue to resonate today. Hollywood has produced countless epic films based on ancient heroes, while sportswear giant Nike is named after the winged Greek goddess of victory.

In football, Italian giants Juventus take their name from iuventus, the Latin word for youth (which is ironic, given their nickname is “The Old Lady”), while Serie A side Atalanta are named after the Greek heroine famous for her football prowess. hunting, racing and wrestling. However, it is Dutch football which is full of the most classic references.

This season, the Eredivisie, the highest division in Dutch football, has 18 teams. It includes three clubs whose names are inspired by Homer’s epic poems “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad” and two teams whose names derive from Latin. The nomenclature of Ajax, Sparta Rotterdam, Heracles Almelo, Vitesse and Excelsior as well as the lower division team Achilles ’29 can be traced. So why did these teams adopt mythological names from the other side of Europe?

Unlike most other parts of the world, where football originated as a working-class sport, in the Netherlands the game was played more by the educated middle and upper classes, who founded teams in the late 19th and early 1900s. beginning of the 20th century.

“A lot of children were not going to school, especially the poorer children,” Dutch sports historian Jurryt van de Vooren told ESPN. “By using all these names, they [the richer members of society] could show that they had a good classical education.

“They went to school where they took Greek and Latin lessons… You could prove that you were one of the best people in society. They could show that they had been educated using names like Ajax or Excelsior and all other possible names. find.”

Here, with help from Van de Vooren, we look at how each club got its name from the classical era and what it means.

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Ajax

Despite its early season struggles, Ajax’s four European Cups and 36 Eredivisie titles make it one of the most successful and famous clubs in Europe. Some of the most famous players of all time have donned their famous red and white jerseys, from all-time greats such as Johan Cruyff and Marco van Basten to two of the most prolific goalscorers in modern football history, Zlatan. Ibrahimovic and Luis Suárez.

The club is named after one of the most famous heroes of Greek mythology: Ajax the Great. In “The Iliad”, Ajax fights in the Trojan War alongside his cousin Achilles. Ajax then killed himself with the sword of the fallen Trojan prince, Hector, and thus died “undefeated”.

Inspired by the history of Ajax, three men from Amsterdam – Floris Stempel, Carel Reeser and Han Dade – founded the football club and gave it its name in 1900. The club crest is a profile image of the legendary warrior.

“They were not all from the upper class, but from the middle class,” says Van de Vooren. “One of their fathers was a school teacher, which meant he could read and write, which was not common in the Netherlands in the 1900s. And all three boys had a secondary education … They knew the old history of Ajax.”

Heracles Almelo

Located in Almelo, a town in the eastern Netherlands, Heracles are back in the Eredivisie after being relegated two seasons ago. The club, whose most recognizable player is former Newcastle United player Jetro Willems, secured promotion to the Dutch top flight at the first time of asking last May.

The club is named after Heracles (known as Hercules in Roman mythology), famous for his superhuman strength. The stories of Zeus’ demigod son inspired a 1997 Disney animated feature film and a 2014 film starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, as well as a long-running television show in the 1990s.

Sparta Rotterdam

The oldest club in the Netherlands (created in 1888), Sparta Rotterdam has won six Dutch championship titles. They returned to the Eredivisie in 2019 after spending a season in the second division.

Sparta is named after the ancient city-state of Greece, famous for its military might and fierce citizen-soldiers, immortalized in the 2006 film “300.”

Excelsior

The Rotterdam club has had an encouraging start to the 2023-24 season; they are fifth in the Eredivisie after narrowly avoiding relegation at the end of the last campaign.

The club takes its name from the Latin word which translates to “superior” in English.

Speed

Located in the city of Arnhem, Vitesse occupies fifth place in the Eredivisie. Outside of the Netherlands, the club was best known for being practically a feeder club for Chelsea’s young players; 29 of them made the trip to the Dutch city, with former loanees including Nemanja Matic, Dominic Solanke, Armando Broja and, most successfully, Mason Mount.

Vitesse is a Latin word that translates to “speed” or “quickly” in English.

Achilles ’29

Much like the hero from whom they take their name, Achilles 29 suffered a devastating fall from grace. The club from Groesbeek, a town on the Netherlands’ eastern border with Germany, has been relegated four times in the last six seasons and now plays in the sixth division of Dutch football. Before their fall, the Achilles 29s were known as a cup team capable of upsetting bigger clubs, as they did against Heracles Almelo in 2010 and Telstar in 2014.

Achilles was considered the greatest of all Greek warriors who killed the Trojan hero Hector before the gates of Troy. He was then mortally wounded by Hector’s younger brother Paris, who shot an arrow into Achilles’ heel, the only part of his body considered vulnerable. Hence the term used to describe a person’s weak point.

XerxesDZB

Even battles from ancient history continue to find new life in the Netherlands. In the country’s second city, XerxesDZB, a team from northern Rotterdam named after the Persian king, compete throughout the Dutch league pyramid.

The club, founded as RFC Xerxes in 1904, looks with envy to Sparta Rotterdam, the team inspired by the birthplace of Leonidas and his 300 Spartans who were defeated by Xerxes in 480 BC at Thermopylae. The two clubs were last in the same division in 1935 before their contrasting fortunes ultimately sent them in different directions through the league systems.

Legends Lost in the Age of Social Change

Despite the trend towards mythological team names, as well as more traditional English names (such as Go Ahead Eagles), clubs named after former heroes are much rarer in Dutch football today. It was not until the time of World War I that football became popular in Dutch society, leading to classic names being replaced with Dutch alternatives.

The Netherlands remained neutral throughout the war, and football provided an effective outlet for traditionally working-class soldiers. Sport helped promote a less hierarchical society and helped dispel notions of uprising at a time when social revolutions were occurring in Europe.

“We can see that after the Great War there was a change in the language used by football players, as more and more people from the working classes after the Great War also loved football.” said Van de Vooren. “They started their own football clubs and didn’t understand English words. The change from English to Dutch in the Netherlands is the change from football as an elite sport to a popular sport.”

The shift towards adopting Dutch names accelerated as the country’s league system began to take shape.

“In 1900 it was possible to use a club name that already existed, but subsequently this became more and more difficult,” explains Van de Vooren. “The example is Feyenoord. [One of] their first name was Celeritas [meaning “swiftness” in Latin], which is also a classic name. But then they went to a higher league in which a club was already playing under the name Celeritas which was older so they had to find a new name… Little by little we see that we stop all the classic names because they were all used already.”

Although the influence of Greek mythology and Roman antiquity on Dutch society has naturally diminished over the years, the names of its football clubs have allowed their legend to endure until today; Netherlands national team captain Virgil van Dijk shares his first name with the Roman poet who wrote “The Aeneid,” an epic poem about the founding of Rome. Intentionally or not, it continues a 150-year-old trend, inspired by stories first told almost 3,000 years ago.