Who is the greatest Netherlands player of all time? The numbers produce a clear winner
Johan Cruyff is undoubtedly the greatest Dutch player of all time, but who is the greatest Netherlands player?
“What’s the difference?” I hear you ask. Well, by Netherlands player, I mean the player that’s enjoyed the best national team career, the player that’s done more than anyone for Oranje.
There’s of course no objectively correct answer to this question, but we can see what the data says, and I thought it would be interesting to do so.
Before we dive into said data, I should point out that I set the following parameters when crunching the numbers:
I’m only considering matches played at major tournaments because they’re the ones that matter, not a qualifier against San Marino or a friendly against Ecuador.
To be considered, players have to have played in a minimum of three major tournaments for Oranje. Sorry Johan, but longevity matters.
Once I decided on the criteria, I started thinking about how I’d measure how good players have been for Oranje at World Cups and European Championship, and my first port of call was Sofascore, an app that has data-based player ratings for each World Cup the Dutch have been at since 1974 and each Euros since 1980.
That did create one problem in that while calculating the average ratings that players had across all of the major tournaments they played in, I couldn’t include ratings from Euro 76 for those who competed in it, which warped things a little for three contenders.
It would’ve helped Johan Neeskens, Rob Rensenbrink and Johnny Rep, who seemingly didn’t have the best tournaments but didn’t have their ratings dragged down by it, and it would’ve hurt Ruud Krol, who was named in the team of the tournament but couldn’t have his strong performances taken into account. That being said, the tournament only consisted of two Oranje matches, so it probably wouldn't have changed things massively.
With that being said, here’s who the 10 best Netherlands players of all time are based solely on Sofascore’s ratings, which take into account a number of statistics including goals, assists, key passes, duels won, dribbles completed and just about anything else you can think of.
Pretty interesting, right? According to those player ratings, Dennis Bergkamp is the greatest Netherlands player of all time.
Now, I’ll be the first to say that these ratings aren’t always reliable, but the case for Bergkamp only gets stronger when you take other factors into account too.
Perhaps the biggest argument in his favour is the fact that he’s scored more goals at major tournaments than any other Dutch player, finding the back of the net 10 times Half of those came in knockout matches too, so it’s fair to say he stepped up on the big occasions.
What’s more, his eight assists at major tournaments is the joint-most of any Dutch player, with only Arjen Robben getting as many.
Robben deserves to be in the conversation himself given he played in a joint-most six major tournaments, has the most goal contributions after Bergkamp and almost single-handedly led Oranje to third place at the World Cup in 2014.
So too does Sneijder, who also played in six tournaments, has the third most goal contributions and was the star man in the run to the 2010 World Cup final.
The only other player you could really make a strong case for when mainly factoring in the Sofascore ratings and longevity is Ronald Koeman, who deserves extra credit for the fact that he played a big part in his nation’s only-ever major tournament triumph to date and, unlike Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard, impressed at other tournaments too.
Ultimately though, the numbers don’t lie, and the numbers pretty definitively say that, only taking into account national team careers, Dennis Bergkamp is the greatest Oranje player of all time.
Personally, I’ve got no complaints. He deserves it for that goal against Argentina alone.