Euro 2024’s Best Party Invite: Meet at the Bus. And Wear Orange.
It started with an old double-decker bus.
About 20 years ago, a group of friends who had met while following the Dutch soccer team around the world decided over beers that it would be fun to buy an old bus. They would paint it orange, the Dutch national color. They would outfit it with a bar and some very strong loudspeakers, and then they would take it on the road to watch their team.
But the bus is no longer just a bus. In the years since it first hit the road, it has morphed into something else: an internationally recognized grand marshal to a parade of tens of thousands of orange-clad Dutch fans who sing, chant and skip from left to right in unison on their way to the stadium every time and everywhere the national team plays.
For the last month, the bus has rolled across Germany during the European Championship, spreading its infectious, internet-friendly brand of joy and unbridled optimism that is hard to square with the popular Dutch idiom that people should “just act normal; that’s crazy enough.”
“We didn’t mean for this to happen,” said Henk van Beek, the bus’s official D.J. and the chairman of the group of friends who bought it. “We’re just fans. That’s the beautiful thing.”
Over time, what had long been a loose and freewheeling endeavor has become more organized. These days Mr. van Beek and his friends work with local authorities as well as the Dutch soccer federation to organize the match day marches, which have grown so large that they now require security and the blessing of the local police.
Their next one, set for Wednesday before the Netherlands’ Euro 2024 semifinal against England, could be even bigger. The city hosting the game, Dortmund, is just over an hour from the Dutch border. Estimates of the number of Dutch fans planning to make the short journey start at 75,000.
The fact that many of them do not have tickets for the game does not matter; the march itself is attraction enough. “I’d always wanted to do it, just once,” said Andrea Kroese, who had traveled with her family from their hometown, Epe, east of Amsterdam, to join the party bus for the Netherlands’ tournament debut in Hamburg, Germany, last month. “This is as close as it could be. We can come here, show the orange and be home for the kids to go to school tomorrow.”
The most iconic part of the fan march has become the song “Links Rechts” (which translates as “Left Right”) by a party act named Snollebollekes, which directs people, on a fast beat, to bounce from — you guessed it — left to right.
Other standards include “Sweet Caroline” and classic Dutch singalongs that start at the beginning of the parade and make their way to the back. The atmosphere is more peaceful than one might expect from a roiling pregame stew featuring limitless beers, powerful loudspeakers and thousands of soccer fans. Oh, and everyone’s dressed in orange.
“We are looking at ourselves through other people’s eyes,” said Hans Plesman, who joined the party on Saturday in Berlin. “This is unique.”
Udo van Huis, who had traveled from Amsterdam, said that while the show was mainly for its participants, there was “a bit of pride that the whole world is watching.”
Before the bus was a point of Dutch national pride, Mr. van Beek, the D.J., said it worked London’s streets as a member of the London Transport system for 12 years — bearing a coat of traditional red paint. He and his friends bought it in 2004, for an amount they would not disclose.
The bus has logged about 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) and often needs repairs, he said, but it has survived some grueling tests. On its journey from stadium to stadium, it was driven through the desert in Qatar and navigated the Brazilian jungle. It has traveled through large parts of South Africa and Ukraine.
“When people see us, it puts a smile on their face,” said Harm Otten, a member of the group that bought the bus.
While he and Mr. van Beek have been around the world for the Dutch national team — attending 285 games and 291 games, respectively — they said they were most happy for the younger fans in the audience, a generation that had not previously had regular chances to support its national team at a major tournament.
The Dutch failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. The last European Championship, held in 11 cities scattered across the continent, was disrupted by pandemic-enforced travel restrictions. Human rights concerns meant the country failed to embrace the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
Germany, on the other hand, is perfect. Despite the authorities’ instituting stricter border controls — many fans reported being stopped at ordinarily defunct crossing points as German police officers searched vehicles for drugs, known hooligans and, in particular, pyrotechnics — access is easy. Berlin, like Hamburg, is just a few hours’ drive for most Dutch fans.
The country, too, has happy memories for Dutch fans. It was in West Germany, in 1988, that the Netherlands won that year’s European Championship, the team’s only international honor. Many have come to Germany this time around to pay homage to that victory; a counterfeit replica of the distinctive 1988 jersey has become an unofficial uniform.
“There has been a lot of nostalgia for 1988,” said Edwin Schoonderbeek, who had driven to Hamburg from the town of Amersfoort. “They’re not real jerseys. You can get them for 20 euros online. I don’t know who’s making them, but they will have had a very good summer.”
The same can be said, of course, for all of those who have attended the marches over the last month. The hope is that there may be a final flourish, that beating England in Dortmund will set the bus off on yet another journey, back to Berlin, trailing tens of thousands of orange-clad fans in its wake.
“We are sober people,” said Andries Veenstra, who left his home in the northeastern part of the Netherlands at 5 a.m. on Saturday, with no ticket for the game, and no plan to acquire one. “But when you’re here, you can’t help but go nuts.”
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