Willem II v Excelsior Rotterdam

Eredivisie Matchweek 5 · Saturday 5 September 2026, 21:00 CEST (19:00 UTC) · Koning Willem II Stadion, Tilburg · Confirmed team sheets

Willem II (4-2-3-1): Delanghe; ter Avest, Stam, Lemmens, Tjoe-A-On; Boogaard, Twigt; Gürbüz, van Aalst, Slory; Haen.

Excelsior (4-3-3): van Gassel; Meissen, Widell, Plug, Janssen; Hartjes, Yegoian, da Silva Moreira; Sliti, Garden, Þorsteinsson.

The FairEleven view

Excelsior have six points to Willem II's one, and the football underneath that gap is much closer than the table makes it look. The team sheets have not changed that. They have made it easier to say precisely.

Excelsior's six points were taken from a newly-promoted side, the reigning champions and one mid-table opponent. That is a set so lopsided at both ends that it cannot yet tell you what this team is — and tonight they field the same back four and the same front three that played the one performance against an ordinary opponent, with Daniël van Vianen benched and Eric da Silva Moreira in midfield instead. Not an identical eleven, then, but the two units the reading rests on are intact.

Willem II have one point and no top-flight win in twenty. They have also created 1.60, 1.42 and 1.69 worth of chances in three matches, the steadiest creation in this fixture, and made five clear chances last time out — more than any side in the round.

Until tonight that was a claim about a club. It is now a claim about eleven named players. Gürbüz, van Aalst and Slory start behind Devin Haen — the same four who produced that afternoon — with van Aalst central and the other two wide of him. When the underlying case and the selected side line up like that, the case gets easier to hold, not harder.

We are still not calling a winner, and that is a position rather than a shrug. Willem II are at home with their most productive front four on the pitch; they also have not won in twenty attempts, which is a lot of not winning. Both remain true.

What the team sheets actually changed

One thing, and it is the thing we said we were waiting for.

Maxime Delanghe starts in goal. He signed on loan from Cercle Brugge on 1 September, four days ago, and has never played for Willem II. Karst de Leeuw, who kept goal in the last two matches, is on the bench — and so is Wouter van der Steen. All three senior goalkeepers are in the squad and the newest one plays.

We are not going to tell you what that is worth. A debut is a selection, not a verdict, and nobody — including us — has evidence about how this goalkeeper performs behind this defence. What we can say is narrower and more useful: the one position this preview flagged as genuinely open has been resolved by the manager rather than by us, and it was resolved towards the new man.

Chido Obi and Maxim Dekker are on the bench. That settles the question we could not answer this morning — both are registered and available. Neither starts, so Haen leads the line as he did against sc Heerenveen.

Vito van Crooij and Thijs Muller are not in the squad. We are not going to guess why, and we are not treating their absence as meaning anything at all. A name missing from a team sheet is a name missing from a team sheet.

Why the match is still shaped the way we said

Willem II create, and they concede. Ten goals against in three matches sits beside the steadiest chance creation in the fixture, and the confirmed side does nothing to resolve that tension — it is the same front four in front of a back line that has not stopped conceding, now with a goalkeeper playing his first match behind it.

Excelsior arrive with the group that produced their best evidence. The back four of Meissen, Widell, Plug and Janssen — Widell wearing the armband — is the one that has conceded three in three. Sliti, Garden and Þorsteinsson start ahead of it, Garden through the middle, and that front three is the one that took fifteen shots with twelve of them from inside the box against Sparta Rotterdam. Daniël van Vianen, who played in that match, starts on the bench; Eric da Silva Moreira takes the midfield place instead.

So both sides field the personnel their best readings were built on. That is the useful thing the team sheets tell us, and it points the same way the numbers already did.

The market, and where we stand beside it

The goals market still interests us more than the result.

On the result the market has barely moved all day and neither have we: Willem II around 2.95, the draw 3.40, Excelsior 2.28, with the home side receiving a quarter-goal start on the line. That is a market treating a six-versus-one points gap as very nearly an even match — which is our own reading, so we see no meaningful divergence there.

Goals are different. Every one of Willem II's three matches has finished with at least four goals in it. Excelsior's three have produced four, three and three. Across those six there are four goals a match. And the Eredivisie itself is running close to four goals a game this season — this is not us noticing that a high-scoring league is high-scoring.

The market is not ignoring any of that. Over 2.5 goals sits around 1.63, which is already a market leaning firmly towards goals, and it barely moved across the day. The 2.5-goal threshold sits below the scoring levels these two clubs and this league have produced so far — but one number on one line is not strong enough evidence for us to call that a robust divergence, and we would rather say so than manufacture one out of a single figure.

So the honest conclusion is narrower than a call. Goals are where the interesting question in this match lives, the market already knows that, and we have not found a robust disagreement with it. What we have is a football case — two sides that both create, one of which concedes freely — pointing at an open, high-event match, in agreement with a market that is pointing the same way.

What we would say against our own football reading. Three matches per club is very little to lean on. The league's own goal rate rests on barely three rounds and will probably settle downwards. And Excelsior have conceded only three all season — if that is a real property of this team rather than an artefact of who they have played, the open-match reading weakens considerably, and by our own argument we cannot yet tell those apart.

The supporting evidence

Willem II. Three matches, one point, four scored and ten conceded — 4-1 at Go Ahead Eagles, 1-4 at home to N.E.C., 2-2 with sc Heerenveen. Uriël van Aalst scored on 61 in that last match and Devin Haen equalised on 82, from 39 per cent of the ball. Both start tonight.

Excelsior. Three matches, six points, seven scored and three conceded. Aymen Sliti scored on 24 against Sparta Rotterdam and Nesto Groen headed the winner in the 92nd minute having come on at 67. Groen is on the bench again tonight — we note it because it recurs, and we are not building an impact-substitute story on two appearances.

What is still not claimed. Nothing available describes how either team builds play, presses, or defends its box, which is why this preview talks about counts and personnel rather than systems. Two independent sources agree on both elevens, both benches and both shapes, so the sides above are not in doubt — but a shape is where players stand, not what they have been told to do, and this club's Matchweek 4 eleven was rendered two different ways on the same afternoon. Neither side's home or away record is treated as an identity.

Nobody here is called unavailable for being absent from a list. One Willem II player is described as out — Thomas Didillon-Hödl — and only because his club published the reason.

We have not forecast a scoreline, and there is not a percentage anywhere on this page.