Pride, chaos, and resignation: the 'broken mirror' of Belgian football and politics

In Spain, we have a beautiful journalistic tradition of trying to explain the reality of certain countries through football . Sometimes , sport is an excuse to talk about everything else : gastronomy, politics, culture, and social issues. This often happens, of course, in countries with a certain glamour, as has been the case with Italy , where calcio has helped so many people learn about the country. But, until now, not much has been done with Belgian football. That's normal. Who could be interested in this rainy, gray corner of Europe? Here, football isn't spiced up with stories about wine, sun, and lightheartedness. But this country, and its football, also deserve to be paid attention to and understood. At least try.

A good reason for why it's never been given any attention is perhaps that it's simply too difficult to understand. Both football and the country. Because sport is a reflection of the complexity of this small state , which became independent from the Netherlands in 1830 and has had its flag colors incorrectly positioned ever since, because the constitution established in 1831 that they should be horizontal, not vertical. But why bother going to the trouble of turning it around or reforming the constitution now? It's the same ease with which they accept being periodically without a federal government for several hundred days. No European country has, as they have done on several occasions in the 21st century , gone more than 500 days without a government. Only Belgium can achieve that, somehow continuing to function without paying much attention to that small detail. No one understands it either. What does it matter?

But complexity has a bad reputation, so the 2025-2026 season will be the last season of Belgian professional football that acts as a "mirror" between national politics and the beautiful game . At least not so explicitly. Until this season, one could follow both with a mixture of disbelief, excitement, and a false sense of understanding something as the years go by. The Belgian first division is now abandoning this cocktail of emotions in an attempt to make the product more digestible outside its national borders.

Until now, it was organized as follows: 30 normal matches, like any other league, followed by a division into three different play-offs . On one side, the bottom teams in the table battle to see who would be relegated to the second division . On the other, the clubs fighting to get into the Europa League face off, and finally, the top six teams faced off to see who would win the league. But since this was perhaps too easy to understand, these top six teams had their points divided in half to make it more "exciting." It's a system also used in some other small European leagues. Teams with exceptional seasons crash in this final stage, and others that were pushing from behind end up taking it all.

In Belgium, many things are this complex. You can get the feeling that you're missing something, that there's a missing piece, and that when you find it, everything will make sense. That piece, here, is a simple sentence: ici c'est comme ça . Here it is like that. It's used to explain the football league or why it's the fourth time that the plumber you paid to come to your house looks at the supposed problem and tells you he can't do anything because you're missing a tiny screw. The same plumber who's come four times, I mean. And he's still missing something after four times? Eh, oui, monsieur. Are you complaining? Ici c'est comme ça. That's the missing piece: accepting that things are this way . It doesn't help you understand it, but it helps you accept it. In the end, the plumber ends up fixing things for you, and you get used to the fact that everything works this way.

On June 9, one year after the last local elections , the Brussels region, the country's capital, remains without a government, Brussels residents held a "giant picnic" in the Place de la Bourse to protest the neglect of their political parties . The origins of this type of local protest date back to that very square, in 2012, when philosopher Philippe Van Parijs organized the first of these picnics to demand improvements in mobility in the capital. They are protesting, yes, but with a dose of Belgian resignation . There are no flying cobblestones and angry faces. There are people having a picnic, saying, "Come on, let's stop this joke." In fact, the motto this time was not that the situation is unsustainable, that it is unacceptable, that it must stop immediately. No. The motto was simply " Ça suffit "—enough is enough.

Just days before this latest giant picnic, on May 26, Royale Union Saint-Gilloise (USG), a Belgian football legend in decline since the 1960s and struggling since the 1970s, won its first title in 90 years after returning to the top flight in 2018. For many Brussels residents, who euphorically took to the streets of the Saint-Gilles district at the end of May , there's a thread connecting the picnic to the Unionist title. The recovery of a certain sense of identity, of pride in USG's journey from the depths to success . The hope that we don't always have to let ourselves be carried away. That Brussels, a city trapped in the political divisions that make Belgium an ungovernable country, is not irreversibly condemned to neglect, to its politicians' lack of vision and ability to act to change the future. That we don't have to accept the perpetual condemnation of disrespecting ourselves.

In the words of Flemish author Stefan Hermans, " Brussels is the small shop full of spoiled goods that everyone enters, holding their nose, grabs what hasn't yet expired, and quickly returns to their apartment complex." The USG shows that it doesn't always have to be that way. That "Brussels belongs to everyone" doesn't have to translate into Brussels belonging to no one. That it doesn't have to be, as Hermans also defined it, "the enormous kitchen where disorder reigns and which countless tenants use but which no one feels responsible for cleaning." The idea that, sometimes, a " ici c'est comme ça" must be pronounced not from resignation, but from pride and demand. In football, it seems to be starting to work. In politics, everything points to it not. It seems the mirror has completely broken .

In Spain, we have a beautiful journalistic tradition of trying to explain the reality of certain countries through football . Sometimes , sport is an excuse to talk about everything else : gastronomy, politics, culture, and social issues. This often happens, of course, in countries with a certain glamour, as has been the case with Italy , where calcio has helped so many people learn about the country. But, until now, not much has been done with Belgian football. That's normal. Who could be interested in this rainy, gray corner of Europe? Here, football isn't spiced up with stories about wine, sun, and lightheartedness. But this country, and its football, also deserve to be paid attention to and understood. At least try.