After Morocco’s Victory: The Netherlands in Civil War Mode

Especially in countries with large immigrant populations — France, Belgium, Great Britain — football tournaments are increasingly becoming powder kegs, capable of tipping ordinary neighborhoods into something resembling near-civil-war conditions. Now it has hit the Netherlands again. After Morocco’s penalty-shootout victory over the Dutch national team on Monday night, the situation escalated across several Dutch cities into Tuesday morning.

In the Hague district of Schilderswijk — home to a large share of the city’s roughly 32,000 residents of Moroccan descent — hundreds of jubilant fans gathered at a busy junction on Vaillantlaan. What began as flag-waving and horn-blaring quickly curdled. Police say heavy fireworks were set off in the district and officers were pelted with stones and fireworks as they tried to restore order. Riot squads eventually moved in with water cannons and baton charges; around a dozen people were arrested, several of them wrestled to the ground and handcuffed before being driven off in vans. Officers described a running cat-and-mouse pattern: a street would be cleared, only for the crowd to reform from side alleys minutes later.

The disorder was not confined to The Hague. In Rotterdam, police made further arrests near Kruiskade as the celebratory mood tipped into confrontation. In Amsterdam, masked groups traded insults and provocations with officers in scattered clashes through the night. In Utrecht’s Lombok district, car convoys draped in Moroccan flags abandoned traffic rules altogether — driving on sidewalks and bike paths in scenes one local reporter called “dangerous, especially for commuters and cyclists trying to get to work the next morning.”

None of this is new. This is now a pattern, not an aberration. Just last January, after Morocco’s defeat to Senegal in the Africa Cup of Nations final, Dutch cities saw a nearly identical script play out: roughly 200 fans in The Hague hurling heavy fireworks at police and bystanders, further disorder in Amsterdam, fourteen arrests nationwide. Go back further, to the 2022 World Cup, and the pattern repeats with almost eerie precision. After Morocco’s shock 2–0 win over Belgium in Qatar, riot police in Brussels fired tear gas and deployed water cannons as rioters torched a car, set electric scooters ablaze and pelted vehicles with bricks; a journalist was struck in the face by fireworks. Belgian police made further arrests in Antwerp. Across the border that same night, Dutch officers in Rotterdam faced a crowd of 500 who pelted them with fireworks and glass, injuring two officers, while unrest was also reported in Amsterdam and The Hague. The following month, after Morocco’s stunning run to the World Cup semi-finals, the same cities braced themselves again.

What should worry Dutch policymakers is not any single night of disorder — flares, a few overturned bins, a scuffle with police are the debris of football fandom everywhere, Dutch, English, or otherwise. What should worry them is the reliability of the trigger. Whether Morocco wins or loses, whether the match is a World Cup last-32 tie or an AFCON final, the outcome in certain neighborhoods of The Hague, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and, across the border, Brussels and Antwerp, is disturbingly predictable: fireworks aimed at police, water cannons deployed in response, arrests by the dozen, and a night’s headlines that look interchangeable with the last one.

Politicians who call for the streets to be “cleared” are tapping into something obvious: a sense that the state tolerates in these neighborhoods, on these nights, a level of disorder that would be unthinkable anywhere else. Ordinary residents of Schilderswijk and Lombok — the overwhelming majority of whom spent Monday night doing nothing more than cheering a football result, as fans do in every country on earth — are left to watch their neighborhoods become synonymous with riot vans and baton charges, not because of anything they did, but because of a hard core of young foreigners for whom a football match has become the only occasion left to test the state’s authority in the street.

It is a repeating dynamic between young immigrant men and riot police that has now outlived several football tournaments, several governments, and several rounds of promised “dialogue” with community leaders. Dutch criminologists who study these events have no answers. They point out that Moroccan fans celebrated peacefully in cities across the globe on the very same night — the disorder is a localized, neighborhood-level phenomenon, not a national or ethnic one, and pinning it on “Moroccan culture” is wrong. But that hardly explains the images of burning scooters and riot shields.

Acknowledging that nuance cannot be an excuse to stop asking why the same few streets, in the same few cities, produce the same clashes every time the Atlas Lions take the field — win or lose. Fourteen arrests in January. A dozen more this week. Two officers injured in Rotterdam in 2022. A journalist hit in the face in Brussels. These are not abstractions; they are officers sent home with injuries and residents whose streets become off-limits to ordinary life. A country that keeps treating this as a one-off, tournament after tournament, is a country that has stopped asking the harder questions about integration and culture.