De club van Sinterklaas en de magische klok

What does “in de soep lopen” mean in Dutch?

In de soep lopen means things are going wrong — badly, messily wrong. The image is wonderfully absurd: imagine a plan literally stumbling into a pot of soup. Dutch speakers reach for it whenever a scheme, an event, or a day unravels completely. You’ll hear it as alles loopt in de soep (“everything’s going to pot”) or just het loopt in de soep — a quick, colourful way to say a situation has become a total mess.

In this Sinterklaas film trailer the Pieten — Sinterklaas’s helpers — are the ones in trouble: Bij de Pieten loopt alles in de soep. The magical clock has broken, nobody can rhyme, and a return parcel has gone astray. It is a perfect illustration of the idiom: multiple things failing at once in a chaotic pile-up. A near synonym is in de soep draaien (to spin into the soup), which carries the same meaning. Outside of total disasters, the idiom also works for smaller slip-ups: a dinner plan, a meeting, a match — anything that goes sideways.