Club Career
Advocaat was a defensive midfielder during his playing days. His career began as an 18-year-old with Hague club ADO Den Haag, and he made his debut with the club as 21-year old in 1967. His professional debut was 21 May 1967 in a 3–0 win against GVAV. He only featured for Den Haag once more that season, and that summer, the San Francisco Golden Gate Gales franchise imported the Den Haag team, which included Advocaat, to play for six weeks in the United Soccer Association as part of an effort to make the sport more popular in the country. It was the following season that Advocaat won his only honour as a player, the Dutch Cup in 1968. In the 1969–70 he became a regular in the team, making 29 appearances that season and scoring his first goal for the club; he made 33 appearances the season after that. From the 1971–72, the club merged with Holland Sport and became FC Den Haag. In that season and his final season, Advocaat made a further 66 appearances and scored six goals. In total he made 147 appearances and scored seven goals for the club.
From 1973, his playing career continued for Roda JC until he moved to VVV-Venlo during the 1976–77 season. In his time at Roda, Advocaat made 121 appearances and scored two goals, and when the club was to be discontinued in 2009, Goal.com described him as their most famous player. In his first season with VVV-Venlo, Advocaat scored two goals in 20 appearances. He made 33 appearances in the 1977–78 season, scoring four goals, and made a further 21 appearances in his final season at the club. In total, he made 74 appearances and scored six goals.
In 1978, Advocaat made the move to the United States to play with the Chicago Sting in the North American Soccer League (NASL). That season he made 24 appearances, scoring two goals. In 1979, he scored three more goals in 28 appearances and for the 1980 season, he scored one further goal from 29 appearances. During the break between the 1979 and 1980 NASL seasons, Advocaat returned to the Netherlands and made 11 appearances, scoring one goal, for his former club FC Den Haag.
Following the 1980 NASL season, Advocaat moved to Sparta Rotterdam to play the remainder of the 1980–81 season. He spent 18 months at the club, scoring six goals and making 61 appearances. Following that Advocaat, moved to Belgium and played in the second division for K. Berchem Sport. He only made 10 appearances there, however, before moving back to the Eredivisie with FC Utrecht, where he made 39 more appearances before the end of his playing career.
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