The History of Football in the Dutch Caribbean: The Modern Era

Following on from his piece on the history of football in the Dutch Caribbean, Steve Menary explores the modern game in the region.

The demise of the Netherlands Antilles in 2010 accelerated change across the Dutch Caribbean. Curaçao would flourish but amongst the victims of wider political changes was the Kingdom Games.

A mini-Olympics for young people in the Dutch empire, the Games was staged every two years, alternating between Europe and the Dutch Caribbean, and football was one of seven sports.

The Games has not been held since the 2009 event in Aruba, but the football associations saw this coming and in 2010 Bonaire joined Aruba, Curaçao and Surinam in contesting the ABCS Tournament. Surinam’s then technical director Kenneth Jaliens says: “The idea to start this tournament comes from the four Dutch-speaking countries in the Caribbean so they will become a strong group to fight for their rights and develop themselves.”

The first ABCS event – the name is an alphabetic acronym of the four contestants – was staged in Curaçao and won by Surinam, but Bonaire’s footballers surprisingly showed their worth at the next tournament in 2011.

Sending league champions SV Juventus and a handful of guest players as their representatives, Bonaire recovered from a goal down to win 3-1 against Curaçao through goals from Andre Piar, Kenneth Kunst and Ivanny Calvenhoven. In the final, Bonaire took a first-half lead with goals from Rolando Jansen of Juventus and Kunst. Aruba levelled and took the match to penalties, where Bonaire memorably won 4-3.

Buoyed by that success, the president of the Bonaire federation Ludwig Balentin wrote to the Caribbean Football Union (CFU) asking to join but the timing proved spectacularly unfortunate.

His letter was passed to CFU president Jack Warner by the Curaçao association at a meeting where Mohamed bin Hammam was allegedly attempting to bribe the union’s members to support his FIFA presidential bid with envelopes containing $40,000 in cash. In the subsequent furore, Bonaire’s application was forgotten.

Only in 2013, after the CFU was reconstituted in Jamaica, did Bonaire become the third Dutch Caribbean island to join the Caribbean body and also CONCACAF.

In addition to the three main islands, there are three other Dutch Caribbean territories: Sint Maarten, Saba and Sint Eustatius.

An Inter-Island Competition was staged between Saba and Sint Eustatius from 2004-06 fizzled out but Sint Maarten started a league in 1979, and an association seven years later.

As CONCACAF expanded into a major political bloc under the infamous Warner, Sint Maarten was welcomed as an associate in 2002 only for the game to die out.

The rebirth of football in Sint Maarten

The KNVB holds regular coaching clinics across the Dutch Caribbean every year but after holding a coaching camp in Sint Maarten in 2008, contact was lost with the Sint Maarten Soccer Association (SMSA). The national team stopped after losing 3-1 to Dominica in 2000 and the league ended in 2011.

Despite little evidence of any football on the island, then CONCACAF president Jeffrey Webb, who would later be indicted for corruption by the FBI, made Sint Maarten a full CONCACAF member in 2013.

“Sint Maarten didn’t even have a structured football organisation then,” says Sudesh ‘Johnny’ Singh, who ousted reigning SMSA president Nicky Owen in elections in 2015 and began to resurrect the game.

A league resumed in 2016/17 with nine teams and Reggae Lions edged out Flames United for the title. The national team was revived, beating Anguilla 2-0 in a friendly before losing 5-0 to Grenada and 2-1 to the US Virgin Islands in the first round of the Caribbean Cup qualifiers.

A second league season was due to start in October 2017, but Hurricane Irma ravaged Sint Maarten and Dutch troops arrived to control looters on the devastated island.

In 2018, the game in Sint Maarten and Bonaire received a fillip, when FIFA and CONCACAF signed a deal to develop the game on Dutch and French Caribbean islands.

Previously, the Dutch federation has helped and used old FIFA’s Goal Project to provide full-size pitches at Antriol and Rincon, and a mini-pitch at North Salina to supplement the main ground in the capital Kralendijk, which has an artificial surface.

The smaller islands also tend to miss out on visits from Dutch clubs, such as Feyenoord, ADO Den Haag, NEC Nijmegen and FC Dordrecht, which have visited Aruba and Feyenoord.

The KNVB does hold annual camps on Bonaire and also qualifies Dutch Caribbean coaches through UEFA’s coaching structure, and this also helped coaches from Curaçao begin a search for eligible players, which transformed the team’s fortunes.

In 2015, Patrick Kluivert took over as Curaçao coach and the kudos of the Dutch legend helped attract players from the European diaspora, such as Eloy Room, Cuco Martina, midfielder Leandro Bacuna and striker Rangelo Janga.

Kluivert joined Paris Saint Germain, left in 2016 and was succeeded at the 2017 Caribbean Cup by his assistant, Remko Bicentini, who led the team to victory with a 2-1 win over 1998 World Cup finalists Jamaica.

Aruba, in contrast, has not made the same strides. The island did not even enter the 2010 Caribbean Cup, and a 4-2 win over St Lucia in the first leg of the CONCACAF 2014 World Cup qualifiers was the first victory in 11 years.

Historically, Aruba’s focus has been on local youth. Some European-based players such as Gregor Breinburg of Sparta Rotterdam and Erixon Danso from Egersunds, featured but Aruba is 200 in FIFA’s world ranking and lost every 2019/20 Nations League game, as did Sint Maarten.

CONCACAF’s new competition did see four Dutch islands competing regularly, but broke bonds. The ABCS Tournament has not been staged since 2015, with a 2018 event cancelled after Curaçao withdrew and the Nations League was announced.

That is the paradox facing football in the Dutch Caribbean. While Curaçao is big enough to try and keep up with regional heavyweights, the smaller islands must juggle old historical links with new international commitments to try and develop the game on their islands.