De Kuip

Feyenoord played on a succession of fields in Rotterdam-Zuid after the club was founded in 1908 before moving in 1917 to a ground on the Kromme Zandweg, which held 400 spectators in its early years and 22,000 by the end of its life. Nothing of it survives.

The driving force behind a replacement was Leen van Zandvliet, Feyenoord's president in the 1930s, who wanted a stadium unlike any other on the continent, with a second tier hanging free so that nothing blocked the spectators' view. The shape is said to have come to him in a dream. He held that the size of the crowds coming to Feyenoord matches justified a modern ground for tens of thousands, and in 1934 he travelled abroad to look at comparable stadiums: Arsenal's ground at Highbury, which had been given a second deck in 1932, made an impression on him, and a study trip to the United States took him to Fenway Park in Boston.

Leendert van der Vlugt of the practice Brinkman & Van der Vlugt, the designers of Rotterdam's Van Nelle factory, was invited to discuss a two-tier stadium; the core of the conversation was simplicity, and no embellishment was entertained. The materials were to be glass, concrete and steel, cheap at that time. For the money Van Zandvliet leaned on the harbour magnate Daniël George van Beuningen, who had made his fortune during the First World War exporting German coal to Britain through the neutral Netherlands. At the end of 1934 the Braat construction workshops took the work on, and as soon as a drawing was ready Van Zandvliet gave the order to begin building.

Puck van Heel drove the first pile on 16 September 1935, and 578 more were driven twenty-one metres into the ground behind it. Building was finished in 1936, but the infrastructure the municipality had promised around the site had not been laid, and the stadium stood unusable for months. It was tested in 1936 by 1,500 people, among them marines and unemployed men, because the demands made of the structure were high. Sand was brought from Wassenaar for the pitch and grass was specially imported.

What went up was not simply a bowl of terracing. Lavatories were built between the steel trusses below and above, and the building also had to hold a meeting room, a work floor, dressing rooms, a box for the officials, a police post, a fire station and four dwellings.

The ground opened on 27 March 1937. The first match played there was contested in pouring rain, Feyenoord beating Beerschot 5–2 in front of 37,825 spectators with Leen Vente scoring the first goal ever registered at De Kuip and the Rotterdammers dominant under their captain Van Heel; the closing stage went out live on radio with commentary by Han Hollander. Van der Vlugt had died in 1936 and did not see any of it. The stadium was formally handed over on 23 July 1937. The first international played there, against Belgium on 2 May 1937, was won 1–0 by the Netherlands, and it was Vente again who scored the ground's first goal for the national side, into the same net.

The building's survival has never been certain, and plans to demolish it have surfaced repeatedly. During the Second World War there was an urgent German demand for high-grade steel, and steel was the core of the stadium, which made it a target; liquidation was close, but the plan came to nothing. The stadium's director at the time is said to have declared only a third of the true tonnage when German inspectors came to see how many tonnes they could win from it, which made demolition uninteresting to the occupier.

Capacity was expanded after the war, in 1949, to 69,000. A record number of spectators, reported at 69,300, is said to have been present that year at the championship match between SVV and Heerenveen. The four light masts that became a signature of the ground were first lit in the second half of the 1950s.

In 1984 the municipalities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam set out to bring the 1992 Olympic Games to the Netherlands, and part of that ambition was a new Olympic stadium on the site of De Kuip. Barcelona was chosen as host city instead. When concrete rot and erosion were found in the structure in the 1990s there was a real prospect that it would no longer meet the required standards, and demolition came back onto the table before a renovation was settled on. On 29 October 1991 De Kuip was named one of Rotterdam's monuments, and as a municipal monument it cannot be demolished without the consent of the city council.

The aim behind the renovation was a multifunctional stadium that more parties could make use of, and one that earned more. Plans were tabled in 1993 and carried out the following year, drawn and executed by Zwarts & Jansma architects together with Van den Broek & Bakema. Eighty-five per cent of the ground was brought under cover, where it had not been before, by laying a free-spanning ring-shaped roof over it that needed no columns or other obstructions in the sightlines, continuing the thinking Van Zandvliet had brought to the building in the 1930s. The canopy was deliberately not made any larger, so that concerts could still be held. Capacity was brought down to 51,117 seats, the fences around the pitch were replaced by a moat three metres deep, and the existing steel and concrete structures, stands, stairs and balustrades were overhauled.

Football carried on through the work, which included a cup final and a Pink Floyd concert, though there was a long break in the domestic season while the World Cup was played in the United States. The whole renovation took eight months and cost 120 million guilders. Alongside the stadium the Maasgebouw was added, a building of seven halls for congresses and corporate hospitality. The rebuilt stadium was formally brought back into use on 16 November 1994 by the then Prince Willem-Alexander, with a goalless match between the Netherlands and the Czech Republic that day. Ten years later the Olympia side, the oldest part of the ground, was modernised in its turn and its halls renamed after Van Zandvliet and Van Beuningen. A further round of restoration and interior work followed in 1999 before the ground was used for Euro 2000, leaving capacity largely unaffected.

De Kuip has been one of the home grounds of the Netherlands national team for most of its life, hosting more than 150 internationals, more than any other ground in the country. The final of the KNVB Cup was played there for the first time in 1950, and from the middle of 1989 the stadium became its traditional home. Ten European finals have been played there, among them the 1963 European Cup Winners' Cup final, in which Tottenham Hotspur beat Atlético Madrid 5–1 to become the first British club to win a European trophy, and the 2002 UEFA Cup final, which Feyenoord won 3–2 against Borussia Dortmund in what happened to be a home match. The final of Euro 2000, held in the Netherlands and Belgium, was played there, France beating Italy 2–1 in extra time, as was the UEFA Nations League final in 2023.

The stadium has taken concerts since 1978, the first headlined by Bob Dylan with Eric Clapton as special guest on 23 June that year, and David Bowie opened his Glass Spider Tour there in 1987. The building of the Johan Cruijff ArenA and the GelreDome gave the stadium two competitors and the number of concerts fell away. In April 2024 the municipality of Rotterdam announced that, with new houses going up nearby, concerts would end from 2026 to remove noise pollution from the area, and that the stadium would receive twelve million euros in compensation. The last was given by the Dutch band Di-rect on 14 June 2025, and the money cleared the debt the stadium company was left with at Goldman Sachs after the abandoned development.

From the early years of this century the city and the club worked on a new ground. The first scheme, part of the bid for the 2018 or 2022 World Cup, stalled when other countries were chosen as hosts, and a plan for the Varkenoord sports complex was called off in 2013 when no majority could be found in the council for a financial guarantee. On 1 May 2014 the choice fell instead on rebuilding De Kuip to 70,000 seats, which would have made it the largest stadium in the country, but the costs ran far higher than expected and in early March 2015 the negotiations were broken off. On 18 March 2016 Feyenoord made known that it preferred a new 63,000-seat stadium on the Maas at De Veranda, part of the Feyenoord City development. On 21 April 2022 the managing director, Dennis te Kloesse, announced that the club would neither build the new stadium nor renovate the existing one, and would stay where it was for at least another ten years.

Supporters have put forward their own schemes throughout, the Red de Kuip foundation with a rebuilding plan in 2012 and, in the autumn of 2025, the architect Nanne de Ru with a plan under the name Team De Kuip that would lower the pitch to reach 56,000 seats. The stadium company and the club had always been separate organisations, which made the governance complex, and in the autumn of 2024 the two declared an intention to go on together. An agreement in principle followed on 3 December 2025, under which the club would take a 95 per cent holding through new shares and invest in the ground to make its use possible until 2040. The definitive agreement came on 22 May 2026, the shareholders approved the change to the statutes on 11 June, and the process was formally completed on 14 July, making the club the owner of the stadium it plays in. The ground holds 47,500 for football, of which at least 800 seats on the second ring are reserved for the visiting side's supporters.