I first read David Winner’s Brilliant Orange fifteen year ago. My first motives for reading the book were naive. I was an aspiring professional footballer. I’d read any book I could find on football, hoping to discover a professional path to imitate. It proved to be an impossible profession. When you’re sixteen, you have no hint to how the world works. You believe, and rightly so, that anything is possible. At nineteen I accepted my lifetime amateur footballer card. I continued my reading however, searching for inspiration or secret training exercises to improve my game. If I was an amateur, I wanted to be the best amateur among my peers. Fifteen years on, my motives to read Brilliant Orange has changed. I returned to the book to see how much the football world, in particular Dutch football, has changed. And in doing so, how much I have changed as well.