Martin van de Pol was a leading member of the F-Side, the hardcore hooligan firm that follows Ajax, and a man with deep roots in the Amsterdam underworld. The film is blunt about him: whether or not he was an enforcer, he was a killer, and he went to jail for it. It is a short film about one night in a sex club, the reputation it built, and how quickly that reputation fell apart.
The F-Side
Van de Pol was in charge of the younger generation of Ajax's hooligans for many years. The narrator says he used that firm as a way of selling drugs to its younger members and to the wider community, the kind of trafficking, he adds, that runs through most of the major football firms, usually controlled by certain people in the leadership. He was involved from a young age, and he was heavily involved in the criminal underworld in Holland.
His record was not only about violence on match days. The film says he had served time for shooting the new boyfriend of a former partner, had been charged with a sex offence against her, and faced numerous firearms charges.
The sex club, 2000
The big story came in 2000. The film is careful here, because the Dutch news reports translate into broken English, but this is what it says seems to have happened. Van de Pol was in a sex club when four or five Hells Angels came in. They were boisterous and physical, and they tried to force one of the barmaids into a room. In clubs like that, the narrator points out, a barmaid is often just a barmaid, not one of the workers. She did not want to go. They tried to drag her.
Van de Pol stepped in. One of the Hells Angels drew a gun on him. Van de Pol pulled his own, shot the man and killed him, and then shot three more Hells Angels.
He was arrested and tried for murder. Psychological reports said he had acted out of fear in a high-stress situation, and because the Hells Angel had drawn first, the argument ran towards self-defence. The judge gave him 15 years for manslaughter. Without that, the narrator says, he would have faced a life sentence.
He came out after serving part of the sentence and was sent back soon afterwards, the film says, when a firearm was found in one of his bags. He served perhaps another 15 months.
Back on the terraces
Out again, he picked up where he had left off. He was notorious for running into rival supporters on his own and fighting them, and the narrator is not sure whether that was drugs or simply his nature. Either way, he was feared, and seen by many as the top man in the Ajax firm.
Not everyone approved. The older hooligan generation shared the same part of the stadium with the new breed, and they did not like the way he behaved. At a photo shoot that brought the two generations together, one of the older men, a top martial artist who the narrator believes was of Moroccan heritage, took exception to him and knocked him down.
Van de Pol did not fight back. He walked away. Overnight, the film says, his reputation inside the firm, old and new, was gone.
Amsterdam, 2021
He remained involved in other incidents in the Amsterdam underworld. In 2021, while he was taking his daughter to school, he was shot and killed.
The film does not claim to know why. It could have been revenge from the Hells Angels. It could have come from the gangland business he was part of. It could have been any of a number of reasons. What the film does establish is the shape of the life: a reputation made in one night with a gun, lost to a single punch he did not answer, and ended years later by killers whose motive is still an open question.