LONDON — The decline of the Dutch, from finishing third at the World Cup last year to teetering on the cusp of elimination from the 2016 European Championship, is the talk of international soccer.
The rise of Iceland — it already has qualified in the same group as the Netherlands, despite having a population of just 330,000, or 2 percent of the Dutch — compounds the sensation that the order of things is being turned upside down.
And when you take Iceland’s 1-0 victory over the Dutch in Amsterdam on Sept. 5 with Turkey’s 3-0 whipping of the Netherlands on Sunday, this looks like a major shift in the balance of power in Europe.