Feyenoord struggling to recapture past success

The Dutch team are attempting to avenge their humiliating 10-1 loss to PSV Eindhoven when the two rivals meet on Sunday.

Feyenoord’s inconsistent season has left players such as Ryo Miyaichi, above, frustrated.

The Dutch Eredivisie can seem a forgiving league. Its end-of-season play-off system to designate places in European competitions for the following campaign is like a safety net for acrobats. A team can tumble quite far in the Eredivisie and still get a second chance.

So it is that, with three matches left of the regular league campaign, Feyenoord can sit in the bottom half of the table but still aspire to a spot in the play-offs for the 2011/12 Europa League.

"That's our aim, to get into Europe," Mario Been, the coach, said ahead of tomorrow's meeting with PSV Eindhoven.

Been can almost assure his players that they are the form team in Holland, at least over the past two weeks; Feyenoord have scored 10 goals in their last two matches.

High scorelines are not unusual in the unbalanced Eredivisie - Feyenoord beat Willem II 6-1 last weekend. But they do not normally run into double figures, as one did, memorably, last October. That was when Feyenoord travelled to PSV.

They trailed 2-0 at half time, and even at that stage were mired in crisis, one place off the bottom of the table. Poor Rob van Dijk, the veteran goalkeeper, then watched eight further goals whizz past him in the second period.

That 10-0 result seemed to mark a new nadir, even for an institution that has clocked up several of them over the past dozen years, the time that has elapsed since the Rotterdam club last won a Dutch championship.

Feyenoord's membership in Holland's so-called "Big Three" - with Ajax and PSV - has become more and more questionable since then. Once upon time, they commanded that group.

They were the first Dutch club to win a European Cup, back in 1970. They are the only one of the trio never to have been outside the top-flight of Holland. But the 21st century has not been kind to football in the Netherlands, and it has been rougher still with the club from the tough port city.

Since Ajax won their fourth European Cup, in 1995, the year the Bosman ruling altered the transfer market in favour of clubs from bigger, wealthier leagues such as those of England, Spain and Italy, standards in the Eredivisie have slumped.

Ajax have fallen from former pre-eminence. PSV have downsized their ambitions.

AZ Alkmaar and then the surprisingly upwardly-mobile Twente Enschede, the reigning champions and very much in the frame still to retain that crown, have recently made the Big Three notion look old-fashioned. All of those clubs are reconciled to a rhythm of finding and then selling their best talents abroad, and quickly. That is the Eredivisie's economic reality.

While Ajax and PSV have sought to create scouting-and-selling models that make the best of that reality, Feyenoord have stumbled to achieve anything similar.

Analyses of their decline often point to the club's failure to stagger the significant departures of stars, pointing out that they lost not one but two leading strikers in the same year, 2006, when Salomon Kalou and Dirk Kuyt moved to Chelsea and Liverpool, respectively.

The Premier League had already claimed a far more gifted forward, Robin van Persie, who had transferred to Arsenal two years earlier.

Frustration among supporters began to express itself in violence around stadiums. Feyenoord's debts by then were soaring, the last significant triumph, the Uefa Cup of 2002, long forgotten. The club's policy of signing ageing stars - such as Jon Dahl Tomasson, who is still on the staff though frequently injured, and Giovanni van Bronckhorst - did not yield trophies.

Successive expeditions in the Uefa Cup brought sanctions from European football's governing body after crowd trouble against Sporting Lisbon and then in Nancy, France. The chances of being back in Europe again may be shaped by how far Feyenoord can shake off memories of the 10-0 thrashing in this, tomorrow's return fixture against PSV.

A revival of sorts has occurred since that nightmare, thanks partly to the January arrival on loan from Arsenal of the 18-year-old Japanese winger Ryo Miyaichi.

Another 18-year-old, the striker Luc Castaignos, has returned to goalscoring ways after a lean spell. But he, like Kuyt and Van Persie before him, will be waving goodbye soon enough, to join Inter Milan in July.

Like so many bright spots at Feyenoord, he is temporary.