Amsterdam has fifty-eight registered football clubs, but the historically serious ones were four: AFC Ajax from the Watergraafsmeer, FC Blauw-Wit from Amsterdam-Zuid, AFC DWS from the working-class Spaarndammerbuurt, and AVV De Volewijckers from Amsterdam-Noord on the far side of the IJ. All four emerged from the Amsterdamsche Voetbal Bond, founded in 1894 as one of the earliest organized football associations on the European mainland. The first official Dutch national champion, in fact, was none of these. It was a now-vanished Amsterdam club called RAP, which won five national titles, gave up football in 1914 to concentrate on cricket, and disappeared into footnotes.

Blauw-Wit, the blue-and-white club from Amsterdam-Zuid, was something quite new for the 1910s and 1920s. Their supporters were among the very first in Dutch football to behave like modern football fans. They painted their cars and bicycles in the club's diagonal blue and white stripes, traveled to away matches as a coordinated group, and sang on the terraces. Blauw-Wit moved into the Old Stadion in 1914, then in 1928 became the first tenants of the new Olympic Stadium, built for the Amsterdam Games. The opening match at that stadium was a derby, Ajax versus Blauw-Wit, and it ended 1-0 to Ajax. For the next 44 years the two clubs shared the Olympic Stadium as a home ground while Ajax used their smaller De Meer Stadion for most regular fixtures.

By the mid-1950s the rivalry had shifted. AFC DWS, whose initials stood for Door Wilskracht Sterk, Strong By Willpower, came up out of the working-class Spaarndammerbuurt and elbowed Blauw-Wit aside as Ajax's main city rival. DWS were promoted to the top flight one season and won the Eredivisie the very next year, 1964, a feat Blauw-Wit never managed in their long history. The club also shared the Olympic Stadium with Blauw-Wit, which made for crowded weekends. Across the IJ, De Volewijckers from Amsterdam-Noord were having their own moment; under German occupation in 1944 they won the national title, the only championship the north side of the river ever produced.

By the early 1970s, Ajax had built the Total Football side that would win three consecutive European Cups. The other three Amsterdam clubs could not keep up financially. In 1972, Blauw-Wit, DWS, and De Volewijckers merged into a single professional club called FC Amsterdam, with the explicit hope of challenging Ajax. It did not work. Ajax beat FC Amsterdam in ten of the twelve professional meetings between the two, and in 1982 FC Amsterdam folded. The final match between them ended 5-1 to Ajax, which was, fittingly, the same scoreline as Ajax's famous fog match against Liverpool sixteen years earlier. For the next thirty years, from 1978 to 2012, Ajax was the only professional football club in Amsterdam. The Stadsderby effectively ceased to exist.

In the 2012-13 season Amsterdamsche FC, a small but old club, was promoted to the third tier and gave the city a second professional club for the first time in over three decades. It is not yet a derby in any meaningful sense. Ajax now plays in the Johan Cruyff Arena out in Zuidoost, named for the player whose career began at the De Meer Stadion in the 1960s. Blauw-Wit, DWS, and the rest still exist as amateur sides, scattered across the city's outer districts: Sportpark Sloten in Nieuw-West, Spieringhorn near the western harbor. On a Saturday morning you can stand on the touchline of a fifth-tier match between two of them and watch a couple of dozen people support clubs that, in their grandfathers' time, drew tens of thousands and recorded cabaret hits. The rivalry has not ended, exactly. It has just retreated to its origins.