NRC and Fidelity together won the investigative journalism prize De Loep 2025 for their series The Football Factoryabout the tough culture within the training courses for professional football players. The jury announced this on Friday evening.
Did it for the series NRC and Fidelity five months of joint research into the culture in professional football youth academies. NRCjournalists Joost Pijpker and Steven Verseput worked together with Fidelitycolleagues Matthijs van Dam and Esther Scholten.
Read the entire series here at NRC, and read here the article that Fidelity wrote about the case.
De Loep is a prize for the best investigative journalism stories. It is awarded annually by the Association of Investigative Journalists (VVOJ). Pijpker, Verseput, Van Dam and Scholten won the prize for the category “signaling research journalism” this Friday evening. This is research “aimed at detecting socially relevant changes in society, such as social, economic, political and cultural trends,” writes the VVOJ.
De Loep has two other categories: “detective” and “controlling”. There is also an incentive prize for research done by relatively young journalists. This year the latter prize went to Jasper Been and Nika Buijs from the Financial Dailyfor one article about tampering with energy labels.
It Dutch Dagblad won in the “controlling” category with one story by Annegina Randewijk about the arrest of a Moroccan boy in Urk. In the “detective” category, the prize went to Maud Effting van De Volkskrantfor one article about gunshot wounds in Palestinian children. They would indicate that Israel deliberately shot children.
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