Who are the favourites to win the Eredivisie title in the 2026/2027 season

A look back at last season

PSV Eindhoven made it three in a row. On 5 April 2026, Feyenoord could only draw 0-0 away at Volendam, and that result alone handed PSV their 27th Eredivisie title with matches still to spare. By the time the season closed out on 17 May, Peter Bosz’s side had turned it into a landslide: 84 points from 34 games, 27 wins, only 4 defeats, and 101 goals scored, a tally no other side in the division came within 25 goals of matching.

Feyenoord finished a distant second on 65 points, a 19-point gap that tells you plainly this wasn’t a title race by the end. But two things happened underneath that scoreline that matter more heading into 2026/27 than the final gap does. NEC Nijmegen, traditionally a mid-table club, finished third with 59 points and 77 league goals, the second-highest scoring return in the entire division, and reached the KNVB Cup final into the bargain. And Ajax, one of the three clubs this competition is supposed to revolve around, finished fifth after burning through three managers in a single season. Both of those stories, one of overachievement and one of chaos, shape the market far more than PSV’s points total does.

So, who’s actually favourite?

Here’s what the market says. 22Bet’s outright odds for the 2026/27 title, published in July 2026, price the race like this:

1. PSV Eindhoven, 1.68
2. Feyenoord, 3.82
3. Ajax, 6.40
4. NEC Nijmegen, 35.00

PSV at 1.68 isn’t quite the near-certainty you’d see with a Bet365 price on PSG in Ligue 1, but it’s still a heavy, heavy favourite in a two-and-a-half-side market. What’s more interesting is the order behind them. Feyenoord, who actually finished second last season, are rated a clearer second choice than Ajax, who finished fifth. That’s the market betting on continuity over reputation, at least for now, and it’s the single most debatable call in the price list. Ajax’s odds assume a genuine bounce-back under a new manager with almost no domestic track record yet. NEC, the closest thing to a surprise package all of last season, are priced as rank outsiders even after their cup run and record goalscoring campaign.

The player to watch: Ayase Ueda’s Golden Boot

Numbers explain part of why Feyenoord, priced at 3.82 to end PSV’s run, are still treated as the clearest challengers rather than an afterthought. Ayase Ueda scored 25 league goals last season to win the Eredivisie’s Golden Boot outright, finishing well clear of the chasing pack in what became a genuine individual race rather than a foregone conclusion by Christmas. It made him the first Feyenoord player to top the Eredivisie scoring charts since Dirk Kuyt managed it in 2004/05, a gap of more than two decades that says something about how rarely Rotterdam has produced or signed a genuinely prolific finisher since.

It matters beyond Ueda’s own tally. He joined Feyenoord from Cercle Brugge in 2023 for a fee that broke the club’s transfer record at the time, so last season’s numbers effectively repaid that outlay inside three years. Recent Eredivisie Golden Boot winners who weren’t at PSV have tended to move on within a season or two of their big campaign: Giorgos Giakoumakis left VVV-Venlo for Celtic not long after his 2020/21 award, and Anastasios Douvikas moved on from Utrecht not long after sharing the honour in 2022/23. Ueda, at 27 and established as Japan’s first-choice striker, is a slightly different case since Feyenoord can plausibly afford to keep him rather than sell, but a repeat of last season’s form under new manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst would put his name back into wider conversations regardless, exactly the kind of storyline that shows up in the data before it shows up in the transfer pages.

Records worth watching in 2026/27

A fourth straight title would put PSV level with Frank de Boer’s Ajax side of 2011 to 2014, though it’s worth being precise about what that actually equals: PSV themselves have already done this twice before, first under Guus Hiddink from 1986 to 1989 and again from 2005 to 2008, so a fourth in a row next season would tie a record PSV already share rather than break genuinely new ground. What would be unprecedented is a fifth straight title in 2027/28, since no Eredivisie club, PSV’s own earlier sides included, has ever won more than four in a row. Bosz’s team are already halfway to that particular conversation.

There’s a defensive record worth tracking too, and it doesn’t belong to PSV. Twente conceded only 40 goals last season, the best return in the division outside PSV, built in barely more than half a season under John van den Brom after he replaced Joseph Oosting in September. If that defence holds up while Twente also navigate a European play-off route, a workload that has worn down thinner squads elsewhere in the division in recent years, it becomes a genuine story regardless of where Twente finish.

Then there’s the scoring charts themselves, which have been far less predictable than PSV’s title procession. Over the last six seasons the Golden Boot has been won or shared by players from seven different clubs, VVV-Venlo, Ajax, Utrecht, PSV, AZ, Twente and now Feyenoord among them, rather than being monopolised by whoever won the league that year. Whether Ueda can repeat last season’s tally while Feyenoord also adjust to a new manager is one of the more interesting individual threads of the new season, and exactly the kind of thing that’s easier to track match by match than to reconstruct after the fact.

Four straight, and the record everyone’s suddenly talking about

Go back through PSV’s season and the numbers only get more one-sided. They won 13 matches in a row at one stage and went 18 games unbeaten between 13 September 2025 and 2 February 2026. The Eredivisie itself led Europe’s major leagues in goals per game last season, and PSV were the biggest reason why. Bosz, whose contract now runs to 2028, is chasing a fourth consecutive title, which would equal the record Frank de Boer set with Ajax between 2011 and 2014. That’s the kind of number that turns a routine title defence into a genuine piece of Eredivisie history, and it’s part of why the market still can’t get PSV’s price much above evens-adjacent territory despite losing Ismael Saibari, their Player of the Season, to Bayern Munich for a reported €50 million in the summer.

NEC’s third-place finish deserves more attention than a solitary line usually gives it. Dick Schreuder’s side scored 77 goals in the league, reached their first-ever KNVB Cup final (losing to AZ Alkmaar), and qualified for the Champions League qualifying rounds for the first time in the club’s history, where they now face Olympiacos. Twente, meanwhile, quietly finished fourth on 58 points with the best defensive record in the division outside PSV, conceding just 40 goals in 34 games under John van den Brom, who only took over in September 2025 after Joseph Oosting was sacked. A defence that mean rarely needs a top-two attack to be dangerous. It needs the rest of the table to keep dropping points against everyone else, and that’s exactly the kind of season Twente had.

Ajax’s chaos, and the manager tasked with ending it

The story underneath last season’s table is really Ajax’s collapse. John Heitinga was fired in November 2025, Fred Grim then spent months as caretaker before Óscar García took over Grim’s duties in March 2026, and the club finished fifth, only scraping a Conference League qualifying spot via the European play-offs. Three managers in one campaign is the kind of upheaval a club the size of Ajax doesn’t often survive without consequences the following year.

Their answer was Míchel, who arrives on a contract through to 2028 after guiding Girona to third in La Liga and a Champions League campaign in 2023/24. It’s a genuine coup for a club that spent last season looking anything but stable, and it explains why bookmakers still rank Ajax above NEC despite the gulf in league position. Feyenoord made their own change at the top, too: Robin van Persie was let go despite finishing second, replaced by Giovanni van Bronckhorst, who returns to De Kuip having won the Eredivisie there as a player. Both clubs are betting that the manager matters more than the table did last season. Whether that bet pays off in month one is exactly the kind of question the data will answer faster than the punditry will.

Three promoted clubs and a play-off that went to penalties

The bottom of the table told its own story. Volendam finished 16th and went into the relegation play-off, where they lost to Willem II on penalties, sending Willem II back up after a season away. NAC Breda finished 17th and were relegated directly, ending two seasons in the top flight. Heracles Almelo finished bottom on 19 points with the worst defensive record in the division, 85 goals conceded, and went down directly too, after three seasons up. Telstar survived the drop only via a goalkeeper’s goal deep into stoppage time on the final day against Volendam, which tells you how tight the bottom of the Eredivisie actually was underneath PSV’s procession at the top.

Promoted for 2026/27 are ADO Den Haag, back after five years away and champions of the Eerste Divisie; Cambuur, up as runners-up after three seasons out; and Willem II, who beat Volendam in the play-off final to bounce straight back after a single season down. None of the three did much business in the transfer market over the summer, and Willem II are generally rated the best-placed of the trio to stay up given their recent top-flight experience, with Cambuur and ADO Den Haag facing the steeper adjustment.

Tracking the race as it actually happens

None of this is guesswork you have to do by memory. If you’re building anything around the Eredivisie title race this season, whether that’s a prediction model, a content product, or a betting tool, the data behind every claim above is available through the Sportmonks Football API, which covers the Eredivisie as part of its wider European league coverage, giving you live tables, fixtures and squad data as the season unfolds rather than a snapshot from August.

If you want to go beyond the table and into who’s actually creating the better chances, the xG Data API breaks down expected goals, xG on target, and set-piece xG for every match, with basic access available right after full time and real-time access on the Advanced tier. That’s the kind of detail that would have flagged Twente’s defensive solidity or NEC’s underlying attacking numbers well before the final table confirmed either story.

For the predictive side, the Predictions API runs machine-learning models across match winner, double chance, total goals, and more, updating daily and generating probabilities up to 21 days before kickoff. Inside the same add-on sits the value bet model, which compares its own fair odds against what bookmakers are offering to flag where the market and the model disagree, useful when Ajax’s price looks more like a bet on a manager than a bet on a squad. And if you want to track how Ajax, Feyenoord and the three promoted clubs reshape their rosters before the window shuts, the Transfer Rumours API tracks speculative moves with player, destination, likelihood, and fee before anything is confirmed.

Where this leaves 2026/27

PSV open the new season away at Fortuna Sittard in the first week of August, still the deepest, most settled squad in the Netherlands and priced like it. But the more interesting question sits just behind them. Ajax have spent big and hired well, betting that Míchel can undo a season of chaos faster than the market currently expects. Feyenoord have changed their own manager despite finishing second, betting the opposite way: that continuity in personnel matters more than continuity in the dugout. NEC, priced as an afterthought, spent last season proving that a mid-table club with the right system can out-score most of the division. None of that is proof of anything yet. That’s what makes a title race worth tracking rather than just predicting.

Want to build your own view of the race? Get an API token and start pulling live Eredivisie data today.

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