Aanvallah! - A football blog.

So here we have it. The Dutch soccer team defeated Italy with a 3- niks score. And it could have been worse.

I'm not a football freak. I did play some, ages ago, at the infamous S.K. 's Gravenwezel. And the only time I wore a teams colors was when I drove my motorbike to go see Lierse becoming Belgian champion. An exhibition of fan behaviour from that magnitude, in my case, that needs some explanation.

I had an advertising agency, MotuNui, and we had arranged for my client Daewoo to be sponsor of the Lierse team.
A Korean client, at that time, was a sort of adventure for my then pretty young company. We had no 'car' experience what so ever. Still that's what made it a success I guess. (We gave a way 100 cars to test drive, added free petrol for a year, all things you wouldn't do with a car back then. We used FMCG marketing concepts for cars, which became an example for the competitive brands.)

Setting up sponsorship with a football team seemed a good idea to increase brand name awareness. The first match of the season, with big boss Kim attending (50% of all Korean people are called Kim) Lierse was defeated, with a humiliating 8-0 against Anderlecht.
Everybody thought our sponsor deal was wasted money. I thought I wasted my client.
Who could predict that at the end of that soccer season, that small team would actually win the cup. There are blurry images in my mind of Korean marketing responsibles dancing on their own cars. (You have no idea how a couple of years in Belgium can actually destroy your good manors :-)

So, yes, that's why a drove my bike and Petra - both with yellow scarfs - to that last remarkable game.

Football, since then, was never that good. Today, the Belgian soccer team is perfect in sync with the Belgian government. Blatantly incompetent to do the job at hand.

And what did we see yesterday? The Netherlands performing pretty well. Holland, playing as a team! Let me repeat that : 'as a team'. Done with the primadonnas and ego's of the last century.
You must know that there is always this sort of rivalry between Holland & Belgium.
Lately, the Belgian Flemish speaking part has some problems with the French speaking part, and vice versa, leading up to thoughts to bring Flanders together with Holland.
Thoughts that can only emerge after watching a boring football game in a burning sun when your face itches from the orange paint and your intestinal flora are being infected with a liquid substance called dutch beer.
Since no two cultures are more different: The Dutch eat sausages out of a wall and drink a pint of milk with it!)
But hey, if it's about a national football team that performed yesterday, then yes, we would welcome them with open arms. It's not that we still have a Justin Henin or Kim Clijsters to keep our country together. But that's another story.


Now how did I started writing this blog? Dutch labmember Jeroen Tebbe mailed me this morning that his 'Aanvallah!' concept was getting more and more international response.

'Aanvallen!' is what you would yell if you, well, charge to take over another country. Yet the Allah! at the back is a pretty good tongue in cheek discovery to add another level. It's a way to get Dutch muslims united with the Dutch soccer team.

A social integration project using football. Didn't I say that creative thinking can actually change our world?




Jeroen Tebbe's labfile