It was just after 9am, outside a coffee shop adjoining Dortmund station.
The man next to me has a half-eaten muffin on his plate, an unopened packet of cigarettes and a lighter he keeps fidgeting with. He tells me his name but I mishear it and am too embarrassed to ask him to repeat himself. He’s wearing an orange T-shirt with a black money belt sashed across it and a pair of orange shorts that sit below his knees.
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He does not have a ticket for the game, he says, and is not going to try to buy one. He’s waiting for his friends to arrive by train and they do not have tickets, either.
So, why are they there?
“Because this is us,” he says. “People say ‘Oh, these orange people they are so crazy’, but the world thinks of our country when they see us all together.”
One of his friends is wearing an orange waistcoat. Another a pair of dungarees that once used to be orange, but have now faded closer to pink. They head off, away across the road, up the steps that lead into the city centre, before disappearing out of sight, towards the biggest game the Dutch have played in a long time.
This began without anyone really noticing.
From dawn, dashes of orange began to drop into the city. First, a trickle, then a stream, and then a succession of waves, crashing through every street, square and alleyway.
Kampstrasse runs through Dortmund’s heart. By 10am, it sits under a canopy of haze, as flare after flare lights up the morning.
Techno music pounds in the gloom, thudding between the bodies — between fans in shirts, wigs, boas, even a painted moon boot, all bright, brilliant orange. Somebody is dressed as a tiger. Somebody else as a lion. There are inflatable crowns. Four friends are dressed as carrots.
The sun is burning through the flog, glinting in the amber of pint glasses and twinkling between the trees. A waiter runs out from a nearby restaurant to stamp a burning flare out on the pavement. Another is being kicked about in a can, so it rattles around the cobblestones, belching its orange smoke as it rolls.
On a platform up the road, a DJ cranks out Links Rechts, Snollebollekes’ party song from 2015, which has become the unlikeliest of football anthems and the soundtrack for the (naar links, naar rechts) left-right choreography that has made the Dutch fan marches at Euro 2024 famous around the world.
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It’s playing for the third time in an hour.
Naar links!
Naar rechts!
Nog unne keer! (One more time)
Naar links!
Naar rechts!
DORTMUND IS ORANJE! 🧡🤯#NothingLikeOranje #CreateHistory #NEDENG pic.twitter.com/zCEoEkcLK4
— OnsOranje (@OnsOranje) July 10, 2024
The more the music plays, the more people arrive. They appear from streets that nobody knew even existed, from subways, trains and on scooters, too, before climbing walls and fountains to sing together at the sky.
Their semi-final with England is still 11 hours away.
Something is happening everywhere.
On one street, plastic footballs are being punted over the heads of pedestrians and cyclists high into the air and to clumsy first touches that draw mocking jeers. On another street, somewhere quieter, three men are dying a friend’s hair orange, spraying it into thick, congealed clumps.
Another flare has been lit. And another. Firecrackers explode from the pavement, each one drawing a cheer from the crowd, as the music keeps thumping through us all.
A fan asks me whether I want my hair sprayed orange. There’s nothing to dye, I say victoriously, removing my baseball cap. He tries to spray my head.
By 3pm, bare chests and shoulders are starting to glow with the heat and the march to the stadium is beginning to form. Drummers and dancers jive at its front and the rattling rhythm draws people in from all sides.
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Giant flags flap in the air above children who have been hoisted onto their fathers’ shoulders. The Dutch are a spectacle. They are the party but also football itself; the names on their replica shirts describe the decadence of their yesterdays and what they mean to the sport.
Bergkamp. Gullit. Van Basten. Cruyff.
Dortmund’s streets are tight and narrow and they leave nowhere to move — forward, back, or side to side. Everything happens as one, with tens of thousands of fans shoulder-to-shoulder in lockstep.
As they snake out of town, locals lean from their windows to watch. When it winds through a hydra of England fans, draped in St George’s crosses and with pint glasses, hands reach in and are clasped and chants are jabbed in with a smile.
“There’ll be no f***ing orange in Berlin!”
The march turns right, aiming south for the Westfalenstadion, and it passes under a Ferris wheel that spins next to a cathedral tower. People lean out from the gondolas to take the best picture they can.
Everybody loves the Dutch.
“Why aren’t you dancing? You must be dancing.”
The woman in front of me does not look back or wait for an answer, she just pirouettes away and disappears into the throng.
Naar links!
Naar rechts!
Nog unne keer!
Naar links!
Naar rechts!
We go left, we go right. We do it again. We bump into each other and stumble and then on we go, picking up speed and marching towards the stadium as it begins to rain. Orange balloons are batted overhead. Empty beer bottles rattle underfoot. People dangle from street signs and traffic lights and more flares are lit, engulfing everyone in smoke once more as the march heads into a tunnel and then out the other side until the Westfalenstadion’s jagged angles loom into view.
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It’s two miles from the centre of town to Borussia Dortmund’s home. By the time the fans arrive, there is no way the Dutch can lose. A couple are getting married in the woods. A woman with orange eyelashes is dancing in what has become a storm. The rain has made a boy’s orange hair dye run, and it’s tinting his ears.
It’s impossible for a team to be beaten with this many people at their back.
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They flow into the stadium, onto Dortmund’s yawning southern terrace — the Westfalenstadion’s Yellow (not tonight) Wall — and pound out their songs and support, on a day that cannot possibly end badly.
It does not. A late Ollie Watkins goal does eliminates the Dutch from the tournament. It is a game they do not deserve to lose and during which they suffer at the referee’s whistle, but it is not where their day ends. The fans briefly fall silent for the first time in 13 hours, their wind taken by the shock of Watkins’ goal, but then the game finishes, the noise starts to stir and that orange army marches out of the stadium, and back into town to add their colour to Dortmund’s neon twilight.
There will be no orange in Berlin. Berlin will be poorer for that.
(Top photo: Hesham Elsherif/Getty Images)