On 1 February 1905 a group of football lovers met in a café in The Hague and founded ADO. On 1 February 2027 the club from The Hague turns 122 years old. It is the story of a club whose name is a motto and whose symbol is a stork.

A café and a motto

The club was founded in the café Het Hof van Berlijn, which today operates as a music café called De Paap. At the time ADO was one of many amateur clubs in The Hague.

The three letters hide a philosophy: Alles Door Oefening, meaning "everything through practice". Few teams in the world carry such a clear message about hard work in their very name.

Green, yellow and a stork

The team wears green and yellow, the same colours as the flag of The Hague. The flag took these colours in 1920, when green replaced the old black, probably because on the city's coat of arms a stork stands on grass. The sources, however, do not explicitly say the club took its colours from the flag.

The stork, the symbol of The Hague, is also the team's trademark. That is why its players are called De Ooievaars, "the Storks", and the mascot is named Storky.

Wartime titles and Happel

From 1925 ADO played at the legendary Zuiderpark. There it lived its greatest moments, with two Dutch championships in 1942 and 1943, when football was still amateur. In the 1942 final it beat AGOVV 5-2.

In 1962 an Austrian took his first job as a coach on the ADO bench: Ernst Happel. The team climbed back to the top and in 1968 won the Dutch Cup against Ajax. Happel later lifted the European Cup with Feyenoord.

From San Francisco to a new home

One of the strangest pages in the club's history was written in the summer of 1967. ADO travelled to the USA and played in the United Soccer Association as the San Francisco Golden Gate Gales, finishing tied for second in the Western Division.

In 1971 it merged with local club Holland Sport and became FC Den Haag. Under that name it won the 1975 Cup, beating Twente 1-0, and the following season reached the quarter-finals of the Cup Winners' Cup. There it led West Ham 4-0 at half-time, won 4-2, but lost 3-1 in London and went out.

Great players such as Aad Mansveld, Dick Advocaat and Piet de Zoete kept the team near the top in the late '60s and early '70s. In 1986 the team won the Eerste Divisie unbeaten, and in 1996 it returned to the historic name ADO Den Haag.

In 2007 the Storks left the Zuiderpark for a new 15,000-seat stadium, which has changed its name several times because of sponsors. The stand of the most passionate fans bears Mansveld's name, and since 2015 a museum has kept the medals of the 1942 and 1943 championships.

Celebrate with us

For us at Sport Arena, ADO is proof that a shirt can tell a whole story: the colours of a city, its bird and a motto that has held true for more than a century.

122 years after that meeting in a café, ADO stays true to its motto: everything is won through hard work. Happy birthday to the Storks of The Hague, and may the green and yellow always fly high!

See our collectible jerseys at sportarena.gr.

Photo: ADO Den Haag's stadium (2012) – Michielverbeek, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.