Ties like Excelsior '31 v ADO Den Haag justify the KNVB Cup's open format

Key takeaways

• Excelsior '31, an amateur club from Rijssen, and ADO Den Haag, a professional club, sit in separate parts of the Dutch football system, so they rarely meet.
• Regional coverage of the pairing, reported by De Stentor, shows that a single tie can draw attention to a club whose league matches get little.
• An open cup format gives a regional amateur club a fixed date on which its whole structure is tested against professional standards.
• The case for an open format depends on the competition being run well, not on any upset that may or may not happen.

The cup is the only bridge between two separate football worlds

Dutch football is split in two. Professional clubs play in the two national professional divisions. Amateur clubs play in a pyramid of their own, and the top of it touches the professional game without fully joining it. A club like Excelsior '31 from Rijssen, a town in Overijssel, can be well run, well supported and ambitious and still never meet a club like ADO Den Haag in a league match. The league system is designed to keep them apart.

The national cup is the main exception. When a cup draw is open to the higher amateur levels, it creates fixtures that no other part of the calendar can produce. That leads to the argument of this piece: the value of a pairing like this does not depend on what happens on the night. It comes from the fact that the competition allows the meeting at all. A cup format that admits amateur clubs, and puts them into ties with professional sides, is doing something that no league, play-off or friendly can do in the same way.

That is a position, and there are serious arguments against it. The argument for it does not rest on romance. It rests on how the structure works: what an open tie forces a small club to do, what it shows about the gap between the two halves of the game, and what it means to the community around the club.

The match result is not the subject here, and nothing in this piece assumes one. The argument holds whether the professional side wins easily, the amateur side holds out, or the match is already over by the time this is read.

The evidence of attention: regional coverage follows the tie

The first piece of evidence is the coverage itself. De Stentor, a regional daily serving the eastern Netherlands, has covered Excelsior '31 alongside ADO Den Haag. That is worth noting because of what it shows about how football attention usually flows.

In a normal week, coverage of an amateur club in Rijssen stays local. Readers who already follow the club read it, and few others do. A professional club from The Hague draws national attention for reasons unrelated to any amateur side. The cup pairing joins the two. For a short period, the regional story becomes part of a national one, and the national club enters a regional story.

The mechanism matters more than any particular headline. A cup tie gives outsiders a reason to learn about a club they would otherwise ignore: where it plays, how it is organised, what level it competes at and who runs it. That attention is temporary, but it is a real way of showing that football in the Netherlands is not only the professional game. Without an open cup, a club like Excelsior '31 has very few ways of being seen outside its own region, and none that come with this kind of focus.

The size of this attention is not known here and cannot be measured from the material available. The direction is clear, though: the pairing, not either club on its own, is what brought the two names together in the reporting.

The evidence of preparation: a fixed date tests the whole amateur structure

The second piece of evidence is the work involved. Hosting or travelling to a professional opponent is not just another match for an amateur club. It tests the whole organisation.

Think about what such a tie requires. Ticketing has to cope with demand far above normal. Stewarding and safety arrangements have to meet the standards that apply when a professional club and its supporters are involved. Volunteers who normally run a modest matchday operation have to cope with media requests, visiting supporters and possibly broadcasting needs. Facilities built for the amateur level are looked at through the lens of the professional game.

Each of these demands is a burden, and the strongest version of the argument admits that. Each is also a form of development. A club that has managed one such fixture knows more about its own limits and abilities than it did before. Its volunteers have learned skills that last beyond the day. Its board has seen, in practical terms, what separates its organisation from a professional one, and that is a better guide to its ambitions than any abstract comparison.

On the pitch, the problem is the familiar one in matches between levels. The professional side will usually expect to control the ball. The amateur side has to decide how much ground to give up, how compact to stay and where its chances might come from. That is a real coaching problem, and it is set by the structure of the tie, not by who is playing. Neither club meets it in their league football in this form.

The evidence of meaning: the tie belongs to the club's own history

The third piece of evidence is less tangible but just as structural. For a professional club, a cup tie against amateur opposition is one fixture among many in a long season. For an amateur club, it may be one of the few dates that people still talk about years later.

That difference is the point. A competition that only produced meetings between clubs of similar size would never create this kind of moment for the smaller club. The open format spreads significance around: for one evening or afternoon, the club with less money, a smaller ground and fewer supporters owns a fixture that matters more to it than to its opponent.

This does not require romanticising amateur football or pretending the gap between the levels is smaller than it is. It only requires recognising that a club's history is made up of events like this, and that a competition rule decides whether such events are possible. Whether Excelsior '31 and ADO Den Haag have met before is not established in the material available to this piece, so no claim is made about it. Either way the reasoning holds: the cup is the mechanism that makes such a chapter possible.

The strongest case against: open cups impose costs and rarely change anything

The counter-argument deserves a fair hearing, because it is serious.

First, open cup formats load early-round fixtures onto a calendar that is already crowded. Professional clubs facing amateur opposition may rotate their squads, which weakens the case that the tie measures one level against the other. If the bigger club fields a heavily changed side, the "test" becomes less informative, and the occasion can feel smaller than its billing.

Second, the organisational burden described above as development can just as easily be described as a risk. An amateur club that has to upgrade its safety arrangements, bring in extra staff and handle visiting supporters takes on costs and responsibilities that may not be covered by the revenue the tie brings. When things go wrong at such fixtures, the consequences fall on volunteers and small budgets, not on professional structures built to absorb them.

Third, critics can argue that the attention is shallow. A national audience that notices a regional club for one match will usually forget it the next week. If the aim is to strengthen amateur football, a single high-profile date may matter less than steady investment in facilities, coaching and youth structures. On this view the cup tie is a pleasant distraction from the real work.

Finally, some argue that sporting integrity is better served by narrower competitions in which clubs meet near-equals, and that one-sided matches add little to the competitive quality of a national cup.

Each point has force. Together, they suggest the case for openness is conditional: it depends on the competition being scheduled sensibly, on safety and cost support for smaller hosts, and on clubs at both levels treating the tie seriously.

Evidence that would change the conclusion

The position taken here could be overturned by evidence, and it is worth saying what kind.

If it could be shown that amateur clubs drawn against professional sides regularly end up worse off financially once all the extra costs are counted, the development argument would weaken considerably. If supporter-safety problems were concentrated in matches at mixed levels, the burden on amateur hosts would look less like a test and more like an unreasonable exposure. If professional clubs routinely treated these ties as disposable, the claim that they measure the gap between levels would lose much of its meaning.

The other way round, evidence that clubs which have hosted such ties then invested in facilities, kept their new volunteers or grew their membership would strengthen the argument. So would evidence that regional coverage of an amateur club lasts beyond the cup round.

None of that evidence is available to this piece, and none is claimed. For now the conclusion rests on how the format works: an open cup is the only part of the Dutch calendar that brings together clubs like Excelsior '31 and ADO Den Haag, and what that meeting does for the smaller club cannot be done any other way.

Sources and further reading

• De Stentor, a regional daily covering the eastern Netherlands, for its reporting on Excelsior '31 and ADO Den Haag.
• Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) competition regulations, for the general framework of cup entry and the split between amateur and professional football.
• Regional and national Dutch sports coverage of amateur clubs in cup competitions, for context on how such fixtures are reported.
• Published academic and governance material on knockout cup formats in European football, for the general arguments for and against open entry.