De Graafschap

The Dutch football association would not turn professional, so in 1954 a rival body was set up to do it without them — the NBVB. Among the clubs that formed to fill it was one in Doetinchem, put together on 1 February that year on the initiative of Johan Roodbergen. The breakaway league lasted barely a season before the KNVB gave way and absorbed it. The club stayed.

It stayed in the Achterhoek, a farming corner of the eastern Netherlands, and the supporters took the point rather than argued with it. Superboeren — Super Farmers — is what the terraces have called the team for decades, and the club has never tried to shake the label off. The old county name, Graafschap, belongs to the same landscape.

Home is De Vijverberg, built the same year the club was, and now holding 12,600. The shirts are horizontally striped in light blue and white, with white shorts and blue socks — a kit that has changed less than the divisions the team has moved through.

Most of that movement has happened in the Eerste Divisie, and most of the drama in the promotion play-offs that hang off the end of it. De Graafschap reached them in 1979 and 1983, then again in 2015 and 2016, which is the sort of record that tells you the club spends its seasons within reach of the Eredivisie rather than comfortably inside it. The KNVB Beker has been thinner going: in 1988–89 they went out early, beaten 2–1 by FC Vlissingen.

The fixture that matters most is the one against the neighbours across the region. Doetinchem is a small town and the Achterhoek is not a big place; the clubs nearest to it are the ones its supporters measure themselves against, and those are derbies with no love lost.