10-11-2025

Tell me the name of your football club and I’ll tell you when it was founded

The Sportgeschiedenis.nl platform uses the Huygens Institute’s sports database, which includes historical data on more than 10,000 football clubs, to analyse patterns in club names. This reveals that names such as “Excelsior” (151 clubs) refer to ideals of elevation, ambition and progress.

Read the article here (Dutch only).

The data source can be found via this webpage.

Or visit the resource sportbondenclubsperiodieken directly.