AZ Alkmaar

The club

AZ, formally Alkmaar Zaanstreek, was founded on 10 May 1967 through a merger of Alkmaar '54 and FC Zaanstreek, the latter tracing back to Kooger Football Club, which had operated since 1910. Alkmaar '54 itself had a claim on Dutch football history: on 14 August 1954 it won 3-0 at home against Venlo '54 in what is regarded as the first professional match played in the Netherlands, with Klaas Smit scoring twice. Brothers Cees and Klaas Molenaar, owners of an appliance store chain, drove the 1967 merger to build a single strong club for the Alkmaar and Zaanstreek region.

The club plays at the AFAS Stadion in Alkmaar, capacity 19,500. AZ moved there in 2006, initially at a capacity of around 17,000, as part of the infrastructure built up during Dirk Scheringa's ownership era.

The head coach is Lee-Roy Echteld. He was AZ's youth-team coach before taking over the first team on an interim basis when Maarten Martens was sacked in January 2026, and the club made the appointment permanent on 8 May 2026 with a contract to mid-2028. Martens had managed AZ for two years after replacing Pascal Jansen, who was dismissed in January 2024 following poor European and domestic form, including a penalty-shootout struggle against amateur side Quick Boys in the KNVB Cup.

Recent seasons

AZ's most celebrated modern spell was 2006/07 to 2020/21, a period of sustained Eredivisie challenges without a further title. In 2006/07 they led the table entering the final matchday on goal difference but finished third after losing to tenth-from-bottom Excelsior while playing more than 80 minutes with ten men. In 2019/20 AZ finished level on points with Ajax at the top of the table when the season was ended early because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and were classified second on goal difference; that squad included academy products Teun Koopmeiners, Myron Boadu, Calvin Stengs and Owen Wijndal.

In 2025/26, under Martens for the first half of the season and Echteld from January 2026, AZ finished seventh in the Eredivisie with 52 points from 34 matches, 14 wins, 10 draws and 10 losses, 58 goals scored and 51 conceded. Irish striker Troy Parrott was the club's leading scorer with 15 league goals and 30 in all competitions. Domestically the season was defined by the cup rather than the league: AZ won all five matches of their KNVB Cup run, scoring 18 and conceding 4, and beat NEC Nijmegen 5-1 in the final at De Kuip in Rotterdam on 19 April 2026, Mees de Wit and Sven Mijnans among the scorers, for the club's first cup win since 2013. In Europe that season AZ went 18 matches in the Conference League from July to April, 11 wins, 2 draws and 5 losses, 37 goals for and 19 against, reaching the quarter-finals.

Honours and landmarks

AZ have won the Eredivisie twice, in 1980/81 and 2008/09. The 1980/81 title was won "with overwhelming power": 27 wins from 34 matches and only a single defeat, a club-record 101 goals scored against 30 conceded, making AZ the only club other than the traditional "big three" of Ajax, Feyenoord and PSV to win the Dutch title in the 44 years between 1965 and 2009. The 2008/09 title followed a 28-match unbeaten run and came 28 years after the first, with AZ finishing comfortably clear of Twente and Ajax.

The club has won the KNVB Cup five times, most recently in 2025/26; earlier wins came in the Molenaar years of the late 1970s and early 1980s and in 2012/13. AZ have also won the Johan Cruyff Shield, the Dutch domestic super cup, twice: in 2009 and in 2026.

Notable scorelines

AZ's biggest recorded win is 11-1 at home to Differdange of Luxembourg in the first leg of the 1977/78 UEFA Cup first round, on 14 September 1977. More recently they beat Dundee United 7-0 at home in the 2022/23 Conference League. The 1980/81 championship season produced a club-record 101 league goals. AZ's all-time domestic record defeat was not established from the sources read here.

European record

AZ have played 25 European seasons and, as of the sources read here, 228 matches, with a record of 109 wins, 56 draws and 63 losses, 383 goals for and 275 against.

Their deepest European run came in 1980/81, when, in the same season they won their first Eredivisie title and the KNVB Cup, they reached the UEFA Cup final. Ipswich Town won the first leg 3-0 at Portman Road on 6 May 1981; AZ won the return 4-2 at the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam on 20 May, but Ipswich took the trophy 5-4 on aggregate. It was the first European final for both clubs. The following season, as league champions, AZ went out of the European Cup in the second round, losing 3-2 on aggregate to Liverpool.

Their next serious European run came under manager Co Adriaanse in 2004/05, when AZ reached the UEFA Cup semi-finals, the club's best European campaign since the 1981 final. They lost 2-1 away to Sporting Clube de Portugal in the first leg on 28 April 2005, then won the second leg 3-2 after extra time in Alkmaar on 5 May, with goals from Kenneth Perez, Stein Huysegems and Kew Jaliens; the aggregate finished 4-4, but Sporting went through on away goals after equalising deep into extra time. Sporting went on to lose the final to CSKA Moscow.

AZ also built a long home record in Europe, unbeaten at home in European competition from 1977 until it ended in a 3-2 group-stage defeat to Everton in the 2007/08 UEFA Cup, a run of 32 matches.

AZ have been regular Conference League entrants in the 2020s, competing in 2021/22, 2023/24 and 2025/26, with the Greek forward Vangelis Pavlidis becoming one of the club's leading scorers in European competition with 16 goals. In 2025/26 they reached the Conference League quarter-finals. AZ did not reach a European final in the 2020s; the 2023/24 Conference League was won by Olympiacos, who beat Fiorentina 1-0 after extra time in the final in Athens, a competition AZ took part in that season without reaching the latter knockout stages.

Quotes

No directly quoted material was confirmed from the sources read here.

Right now (2026/27)

Lee-Roy Echteld remains head coach, now on a permanent contract to mid-2028 after his interim spell following Martens's sacking. AZ have started the 2026/27 Eredivisie season very strongly: after six matches they had five wins and a draw, second in the table, 16 points, 17 goals scored and 6 conceded, a run that included a 5-2 home win over Go Ahead Eagles and a 2-3 away win at SC Heerenveen on 6 September 2026. That run was checked by a 1-1 home draw against Willem II on 11 September, in which captain Jordy Clasie scored first before Willem II equalised in the 81st minute.

AZ qualified for the 2026/27 UEFA Europa League league phase as reigning KNVB Cup winners. Their eight-match league phase schedule includes Ararat-Armenia, Juventus, Sparta Praha, Sturm Graz, Dinamo Zagreb and Benfica, and opens away at Sunderland at the Stadium of Light on 16 September 2026, kicking off at 20:00 UK time and shown live on TNT Sports. It is Sunderland's first-ever UEFA Europa League fixture and AZ's fifteenth participation in the competition. Sunderland go into the match having lost 2-0 at home to Arsenal in the Premier League on 12 September, while AZ travel to England on the back of their five-match unbeaten Eredivisie run and Saturday's draw with Willem II. Confirmed team news and lineups for the match were not established from the sources read here.

Sources

Researched and written for not4quarters. Where a fact could not be established from the sources read, this page says so rather than guessing.