Robert Mühren is 37, and he has scored eight goals in NLD Division 1 this season. Henk Veerman, 35, has scored five. Between them they have 13 of Volendam's 24 league goals, and Volendam are fourth.

Fifteen months ago, a Dutch regular in general chat held Mühren up as proof that the game's ratings had gone wrong:

Check out this Robert Muhren for example, he is 36 tried 3/4 times to come to highest in Netherlands he never succeeded now he only play leugue 2 and always ready to make easy goals. but he does score a lot.

Mühren is at the highest level now. The manager who took him there has never said a word about it in public.

The quiet one

Nelson3 has no linked Discord account, and searching the community archive for his name finds nothing. He owns no Volendam influence and has 5.35 SVC in his wallet. What he does have is 70 matches in the Volendam dugout (45 wins, 11 draws, 14 defeats), the longest spell any manager has had at the club.

That counts for a lot here. In the 12 months before he arrived, nine different managers held the job and none lasted more than 22 matches. Volendam finished 12th in Division 2 and then fifth.

His own arrival comes with a footnote. On 22 December 2025 he took over Kukës in Albania's second tier. Without a manager, they had just won nine of their last eleven. He took charge for one match and lost it, yet the record book credits him with the ALB Division 2 title. Sixteen days later he left for Volendam, arriving on 7 January, four days into season three.

The data doesn't say why he picked a Dutch second-tier side that had just finished fifth. It does show what he did next.

Five months, no signings

For his first five months Nelson3 signed nobody. Volendam won Division 2 anyway: 27 wins from 38, 76 goals scored, 21 conceded and 87 points, 14 more than Luis Garcia's Almelo.

He has kept that approach in the top flight. Nineteen of the 23 players in his squad have no transfer on their record. Ten of the eleven names on his default team sheet have never changed clubs in the game. The eleventh, Arijan Ademi, was bought before Nelson3 arrived.

All his deals in ten months:

• Tobias van den Elshout: bought from Cagliari for 7,995,000 SVC (June)
• Javier Vázquez López: bought from Boyacá for 1,810,350 SVC (July)
• Peder Hoel Lervik: bought from Molde for 1,944,000 SVC (August)
• Khadim Ngom: sold to Molde for 1,944,000 SVC, three minutes later
• Luca Blondeau: sold to Balzers for 6,943,500 SVC (October)

The Molde deals amounted to a straight swap of two 21-year-old goalkeepers, both rated 62 and both on 2,160 SVC wages, for the same fee. Blondeau had played 194 minutes of league football this season when Balzers paid almost 7M for him. Net spend over ten months is 2,861,850 SVC. The biggest signing has made the least impact so far: van den Elshout, 19, has played 932 league minutes and scored once.

Volendam's wage bill of 353,635 SVC is the third-smallest in the division. Only Arnhem and Waalwijk, 18th and 19th, pay less. Huggo's Ajax pay almost eight times as much. Utrecht, Enschede, Alkmaar and Deventer all pay more than double Volendam's bill, and all four sit below them.

Young at the back, old up front

Nelson3 sets up in a 4-4-1-1 with a young defence and old strikers. Three 24-year-olds play at the back: Yannick Leliendal (rated 83), Déron Payne (82) and Xavier Tshimanga Kamaluba (82). Behind them is 23-year-old keeper Kayne van Oevelen, whose average match rating of 7.32 is the best in the squad. Mawouna Amevor, 34, has played more league minutes than anyone. Alex Plat is captain and takes the set pieces, and Mühren takes the penalties.

His tactics run to eight instructions. There is a change at 15 minutes, another around the hour, and separate orders for the last ten minutes depending on the score.

The results show a team that wins by small margins. Nine of Volendam's 12 league wins have been by a single goal, and six of those finished 1-0. They have kept nine clean sheets. Even so, they have scored 24 and conceded 25, making them the only top-five side with a negative goal difference. Three heavy defeats explain it: 0-3 at home to Ajax, 0-4 at Eindhoven and 0-5 at Nijmegen account for 12 of the goals against. In their other 21 games they have conceded 13.

The two clubs promoted alongside them show how hard the step up is. Almelo are 13th. RalfBulgaria's Sittard are 16th, although Sittard are also the only side to beat Volendam home and away in the league.

The hard part

R9Fenomeno is the biggest shareholder with 37,361 shares, and there is no vote open at the club. The game's tactician rankings put Nelson3 122nd.

The top three are still a problem. Against Ajax, Slice's Feyenoord and Eindhoven this season, league and cup together, Volendam have played four, lost four and failed to score. Eindhoven, who knocked them out of last season's cup 4-0, won by the same score in September. Feyenoord visit Volendam Stadium on Wednesday. On Saturday Volendam go to Ajax, where 55,847 watched them lose a cup tie last month.

In June, 7,363 people watched the last home game of the title season. Every league crowd at Volendam Stadium this October was above 12,900, in a ground that holds 12,960. Nelson3 hasn't explained his method, but the supporters keep turning up.