The rivalry between Feyenoord and Ajax was an instructive example: an enmity rooted in Amsterdammers’ and Rotterdammers’ shared belief that the other came from a strange and distant place. Rotterdam’s snootier residents sometimes claimed that their city was ‘the Dutch New York’. Thanks to the docks, a better analogy would be Detroit or Pittsburgh: Rotterdam was a grimy, sprawling city of doers, not thinkers, salt-of-the-earth types who rolled up their sleeves and relished hard work. Rotterdammers were predictably scathing about those living in other, more refined cities, viewing people from
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