If everyone wrote about sports like Nico Scheepmaker, I would immediately become a sports book fan

MToday the Nico Scheepmaker Cup will be awarded for the twentieth time in the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam. There are five books on the shortlist: Leen Sanders – The boxer who saved lives in Auschwitz by Erik Brouwer; The plan from Nando Boers; Focus from Mark van den Heuvel; Anoush by Ivo Roodbergen and With all your heart by Erik van den Berg. All sports books, because the Nico Scheepmaker Cup is intended for the best sports book of the year.

The prize is named after Nico Scheepmaker because the poet and Slavist (he translated, among other things Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak) in the magazine in the late 1950s Sports & Sports World started a weekly football column that, wrote Alexander Münninghoff in 2013, heralded a completely new genre in football reporting. Scheepmaker (1930-1990) did not focus so much on the game but described the players as people, with an eye for their moods and shortcomings. In doing so, he ‘liberated football from its isolation as top sport far removed from everyday reality, only interesting for enthusiasts’.

Although I’m not much into sports (Nico Scheepmaker died at the age of 59 after a game of tennis!), after reading those sentences I curiously went to the attic. By a sardonic twist of fate, there are about a thousand sports books there, which I recently lovingly put in alphabetical order after their owner had stomped down the stairs for the umpteenth time with the announcement that the book he was looking for had ‘disappeared without a trace’ ‘ and he went to buy a new copy. Scheepmaker stood neatly sandwiched between Sargentini and Sergent. I grabbed Ajax and the art of football and started reading. It was about a sport that doesn’t interest me and about players who are long dead, and it was wonderful. If everyone wrote about sports like Nico Scheepmaker, I would immediately become a sports book fan.

But that doesn’t happen. More books are being published than ever and there are good books among them, but most of them are quickly put together rubbish. The last to introduce a new and special genre was Michel van Egmond – but his Gibe dates back to 2012. According to publishers, the sports book is struggling and sales are declining.

There is no monetary prize attached to the Nico Scheepmaker Cup, the winner receives a rather ugly glass case with his name on it, plus the praise of a small circle of experts. That is sympathetic, but the Dutch sports book could use a major quality boost. Perhaps a little more ambition for the next twenty years is not a bad idea.