In 1959, a group of disgruntled Amsterdam football supporters - angry that their old club had been swallowed in a merger - decided to start their own. They called it De Zwarte Schapen. The Black Sheep. It is not a name you choose if you expect respect. It is a name you choose if you have already decided respect is not on offer. Sixty-four years later, in June 2023, the great-grandchild of that defiant little outfit walked onto the pitch as a fully-promoted Eredivisie club. The route between those two points goes through five rebrands, a record-breaking 12-1 thumping, a five-year plan that actually worked, and a city built on drained seabed that decided it deserved top-flight football of its own.
BVC Amsterdam was founded in 1954. By 1959 it had merged into the bigger club DWS, and a portion of the supporters refused to follow. They built their own club from scratch and chose, with self-aware contempt, to call themselves the Black Sheep. The club moved through identities the way other clubs move through managers: Argonaut-Zwarte Schapen in 1978, FC Sloterpas in 1988. After several violent incidents on the pitch in 1995, the Royal Dutch Football Association suspended the club for six months and the survivors fled Amsterdam for the newly built city of Almere, twenty kilometres east across the IJmeer. In 1997 they became Sporting Flevoland. In 2000 they became FC Omniworld, the football branch of a multi-sport project the city of Almere was bankrolling to put itself on the national map. None of these names stuck because none of the identities did. The club kept losing matches and changing letterhead.
In their second match of the 2010-11 season - the first under the freshly minted name Almere City FC - they travelled to Rotterdam to face Sparta. The match ended 12-1. The striker Johan Voskamp scored eight goals on his debut, a Jupiler League record that still stands, and Sparta equalled the all-time Dutch league record for the largest win. Almere finished the season dead last. They were saved from relegation only because another club, RBC Roosendaal, went bankrupt. There are seasons that define a club; this one defined Almere City by what it was not yet. The grandstand at the time held about three thousand people. Most of them, on the long Sunday drives home from away losses, must have wondered what the point was. Black sheep indeed.
In 2016, CEO John Bes sat down with the supervisory board and announced a five-year plan. The goal was to reach the Eredivisie. For a club still better known for being thrashed than for thrashing anyone, the announcement read like wishful thinking on letterhead. But the plan was specific. Build the grandstand. Stabilise the finances. Hire a manager who could actually develop players. Jack de Gier began the work; Ole Tobiasen continued it to a seventh-place finish in 2019; Alex Pastoor finished it. In the 2020-21 season, conducted largely behind closed doors because of COVID, Almere set club records of 75 points and 75 goals. Two years later, in June 2023, under Pastoor, they beat FC Emmen 4-1 on aggregate in the promotion play-offs and went up. Forty-six years after disgruntled Amsterdam supporters started a club in protest, that club kicked off in the Dutch top flight.
Top-flight football turned out to be harder than the play-off run suggested. The first Eredivisie season went well enough - the club survived. The second did not. Pastoor left. Hedwiges Maduro, the former Ajax defender brought in to replace him, was dismissed in December 2024 with the team eight points adrift at the bottom after a single win in sixteen matches. Jeroen Rijsdijk took over for a third stint. The team finished last and went back down. In July 2025, the engine manufacturer Yanmar agreed to buy the club and the rights to the stadium that now bears its name; the takeover finalised in November. The Black Sheep are back in the Eerste Divisie, under new ownership, with a capacity of 4,501 and one season's worth of memories of Eredivisie weekends. The plan worked. The follow-on plan is still being written.
Almere did not exist before the Flevoland polder was drained in 1968. It is the youngest large city in the Netherlands, built on what used to be the Zuiderzee, planned from scratch around lakes and modernist neighbourhoods. A city that new does not inherit a football identity the way Amsterdam or Rotterdam do. It has to manufacture one. Almere City FC, for all the chaos of its first half-century, has become that identity - the Yanmar Stadion sits north of the lake, the orange of the kit travels with the team to away grounds across the country, and the supporters who make the trips know they are following something that, on paper, should not have lasted past 1995. That it has lasted, that it briefly competed with Ajax, is the kind of small Dutch miracle that gets built one stubborn season at a time.
Yanmar Stadion sits at 52.39 N, 5.24 E in Almere, Flevoland province, on land reclaimed from the Zuiderzee in 1968. The stadium is at the northern edge of the city, near the A6 motorway. Nearest airport: Lelystad (EHLE), about 25 km east. Schiphol (EHAM) is roughly 35 km southwest, beyond the IJmeer. From cruising altitude, Almere reads as a planned-grid city set against the long water boundary of the Markermeer.