The Rise of the Red Devils

How Belgium built one of the top contenders for the 2014 World Cup, and what the team means to this
fractious nation
by Sam Knight on May 15, 2014Print
1. Famous Belgians
When I was about 10 years old, my father told me the joke about famous Belgians. Few things tickle my father
more than pithy little axioms that turn out to be unarguable. Never sleep with a woman who keeps a diary.
Always jump off the high side of a sinking ship. Great art is about love and loss. Dont commit troops to a land
war in Asia. You cant name 10 famous Belgians.
For a long time, the line held. A nice piece of English condescension toward an odd, troubled little European
country that spent the first half of the 20th century getting invaded and the second half hosting international
organizations that were too boring to exist anywhere else. And the wisecrack was true you couldnt get to 10.
You started with Tintin, or Herg, (or Georges Remi, the actual cartoonist). Then you got Eddy Merckx, the
cyclist. Then, if you were growing up in Britain in the 1980s, like me, and you saw him on TV every weekend,
you asked if you were allowed Poirot, even though he was fictional. And Poirot was permitted. Because guess
what? You werent getting to 10. And sure, you could scour your sisters encyclopedia and get Leo Baekeland,
who invented a kind of plastic called Bakelite, and you might go through a pretentious surrealist phase as a
teenager with Ren Magritte posters on your walls and add him to the mix. You could kid yourself that you
were making progress. But you knew, and your dad knew, and even Belgium knew, that there was no chance of
making it to 10. It could just as well have been five.
So I was conscious of a tiny feeling of loss the latest filing-away of my childhood when I rode the train
recently from London to Brussels and stood on the edge of a soccer field containing no fewer than 15 famous
Belgians. My fathers wit gave out right before my eyes as I watched the members of the national team
undertake some light evening training a couple days before their final preWorld Cup friendly against Ivory
Coast. And that is because, without much warning and without heeding the idea that it is not really associated
with world-class soccer, Belgium has recently become a factory for many of the sports best-known and most
valuable players. The Red Devils, as they are known, are expected to be one of the most exciting teams in this
summers tournament.
A few yards away, on the other side of a low hedge, Simon Mignolet and Thibaut Courtois, of Liverpool and
Atletico Madrid, were throwing themselves through drills with a quiet, gum-chewing intensity. The two men are
among the finest young goalkeepers in the world. Mignolet is fast and sturdy, like a prodigiously gifted
farmhand, but Courtois, who is just 22 and has the long frame of a swimmer, has recently displaced him as
Belgiums starter. (Everyone agrees Mignolet has done nothing wrong; Courtois, whose impossible save
helped knock Chelsea out of this years Champions League, is just better.) Beyond them, an equally starry
squad was playing a loose game of attack and defense against a backdrop of low houses, scrub, and trees. A few
geese flew over as Daniel van Buyten, the Bayern Munich defender, cut inside Axel Witsel, a $55.2 million
signing for Zenit St. Petersburg in 2012, and thrashed the ball high into the roof of the net.
It is difficult to convey the strangeness of watching this. Until I found the celebrity athletes in mid-training, my
surroundings and the whole vibe had been, well, extremely Belgian. I had arrived earlier in the afternoon and
taken the metro to the green, low-density suburbs outside Brussels. Posters in the stations showed the rate of
climate change in the Antarctic. Challenging piano music, possibly Dvok, played through the PA system. I
disembarked at Eddy Merckx station and walked through a quiet landscape of modest sporting facilities a
dry ski slope, locked up for spring, and a small stadium tucked into the side of a hill. Runners jogged down to a
small lake. There were childrens nurseries. People nodded good evening to one another. Then, all of a sudden I
was face-to-chest with Marouane Fellaini, the gangling, microphone-haired $45.4 million Manchester United
midfielder.
It was jarring. History says you dont find these players here. Belgium is not Holland or France or Germany. Its
never been a first-rank soccer nation. Until recently, Belgiums much larger claim to fame has been its quiet,
stubborn doubt that it is a nation at all. The 11 million people who comprise its population a collection of
French speakers, Dutch-speaking Flemish, and ethnic Germans often give the impression that they just
happen to live there. (Belgium recently went two years without an elected government, and its largest political
party, the Flemish NVA, is committed to the long-term breakup of the country.) Belgiums greatest
achievement in the beautiful game remains winning gold at the 1920 Olympics, when its Czechoslovakian
opponents abandoned the final at halftime in a protest over the refereeing.
So even the people of Belgium have needed a few years to adjust to having a national team worth hundreds of
millions of dollars in transfer fees and expected to last deep into the 2014 World Cup. People in the soccer
world noticed something stirring at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when the countrys under-23 side reached the
semifinals. But the new sharp kids didnt cut it in the homeland. They didnt look or act like Belgiums capable
teams of the past clever, bearded practitioners of the offside trap, with a gifted striker up front to snaffle the
goals. The new generation didnt seem to care much, either. They turned up late for training. They didnt defer
to their old, mediocre coaches. They failed to make the World Cup in 2010 and even the European
Championships in 2012, when they got caught up in ridiculous, naive games instead of grinding out results
against weaker teams during the qualification period. The most infamous example was a 4-4 draw with Austria
in October 2010, in which Belgium, playing at home, gave up two leads to a team playing with 10 men. In
2011, arguably the most talented player of the lot, Eden Hazard now the $43.8 million fulcrum of Chelsea
FC got subbed out during a qualifier against Turkey and walked straight out to eat a burger in the parking lot
while the match carried on inside. The Belgian press named them The Vuitton Generation.
But things are different now. Everyone is a few years older. They are richer and more determined. Since
Beijing, Belgiums best players almost the entire national squad have gone abroad to play for some of the
wealthiest clubs in Europe. According to Jacques Lichtenstein, the agent who represents Vincent Kompany, the
captain and cornerstone of both Belgium and Manchester City, the Vuitton boys are now ready to contemplate a
national, collective endeavor. Individually, already they have reached something, Lichtenstein told me. Now
all of a sudden they want to tell their offspring they have won the cups [that] they have played in the biggest
competition, they have been to the World Cup.
Theyve got the coach they want, too. Before he took over in May 2012, Marc Wilmots, a former striker for the
national team who had a brief career as a Belgian senator, met with the senior players and made sure of their
support. That summer, the Red Devils took off. In a friendly game now spliced, slow-mod, set to European
house music, and sprayed all over YouTube, Belgium dominated the Netherlands, their next-door neighbors and
permanent soccer superiors, 4-2. And they didnt just score more. They out-swerved and out-tricked the Dutch.
They tore them a new one.
We were attacking Holland! Eric Reynaerts, the leader of the teams official fan club, told me, as if this were
subverting all that is natural in the world. I have never seen that! Under Wilmots, the new Belgian players
have appeared to banish not only Belgiums old style of soccer (opportunistic, defensively minded) but also a
national way of thinking. We are always the small Belgians, Reynaerts said. Every time, we are modest.
Now there is a little bit of realizing we can be big, too. The current side want the ball at their feet. To make
rhythms. To suck in other teams with neat, going-nowhere triangles, before springing the ball to the free man.
(Here, at 57 seconds). In Hazard and Napoli winger Dries Mertens, they have pickpockets and shufflers. In
Kompany, Fellaini, and their big, physical strikers, Belgium has enforcers and men to run through walls. Last
October, Belgium qualified for the World Cup without losing a game. The team reached an all-time high of fifth
in the FIFA world rankings, up 59 places in three years, and when you talk to people in Belgium now about the
teams chances in Brazil, no one wants to speak about limits. If they dont get to the quarterfinal, Lichtenstein
said, I think everyone will be disappointed.
And why shouldnt they be? As the evening training session in Brussels wound down, I turned around to look
into the locker room, where some of the most precious players of all were being softly pummeled and oiled.
Hazard was talking a mile a minute to Christian Benteke, the bulky no. 9 for Aston Villa and Wilmots first-
choice striker (who has since suffered an Achilles injury and wont be able to play at the World Cup). Sitting
alone, a few feet away, was Kompany. Twenty-four hours earlier, he had lifted Englands League Cup,
Manchester Citys first trophy of the season, in front of 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium. This past Sunday,
he thumped in the decisive second goal against West Ham to seal the clubs second Premiership title in three
years. And here in Belgium, Kompany was staring out at the pitch, like a general contemplating battle, the
shadows of his teammates growing long in the fading light.
2. A Utopian System of Soccer
Michel Sablons phone doesnt stop ringing. He is the man credited with building the Belgian soccer production
line. When we met at the headquarters of the Royal Belgian Football Association, Sablon had just returned from
a trip to Eastern Europe, where he had been visiting coaches and national federations from Bulgaria to
Azerbaijan. Everyone had been begging for secrets. Sablon, who is 67, looked like he could do with a break.
Too many, he said, when I asked how many countries were calling him these days. I was on Romanian
television for two hours.
Belgiums rise began with humiliation. Sablon was an assistant coach at the 1986 World Cup for Belgiums last
golden generation. Built on brilliant goalkeeper Jean-Marie Pfaff and midfielder Enzo Scifo, known as Le
Petit Pel, the team reached the semifinals. A decade and a half later, Sablon was asked to run the Belgian half
of Euro 2000, which the country cohosted with Holland. But the tournament was a disaster for the national
team. Boring, slow and unimaginative talking instead of playing, says Sablon the Belgians scored two
goals in four minutes in their first match against Sweden and did precisely nothing after that. Belgium lost its
subsequent games and became the first-ever host of a European tournament to be knocked out in the first round.
Sablon became the technical director of the Belgian FA two years later. His first move was to tear up the
existing system. We started from scratch, he explained. We said, What were doing now, it doesnt work.
The national team was out of ideas. The youth teams coming through werent getting any better. Coaching was
mired in outdated soccer dogma 8-year-old girls were being asked to play as liberos, sweepers in the
Beckenbauer mold, because Belgiums professional teams had a thing for playing three central defenders at the
time. It didnt make sense to teach the game that way. No one was having any fun.
Sablon worked like a maniac. He spent two years driving to Belgian youth competitions and studying what the
French and Dutch national teams (at the time the strongest in the world) were up to. He commissioned
researchers at the University of Leuven to analyze 1,600 hours of footage of young boys playing 11-on-11 to
figure out how often they actually touched the ball (an average of four touches per player every 20 minutes). He
convened Peoples Congressstyle meetings with groups of coaches from various levels of Belgian football to
discuss formations and training methods. We were crazy, of course, he told me. We never stopped. We
started in the morning and we finished in the night. Every day, Saturday and Sunday.
The result, unveiled in 2004, was Belgiums master plan, called G-A-G Global-Analytique-Global in French,
or Globaal-Analytisch-Globaal in Dutch. The idea was to fuse the best of French soccer its emphasis on
physical power and tactical efficiency, hence Analytique with the dreamy technique of the Dutch
(Global), and invent a new kind of exciting, attacking soccer (Global again). Our ultimate goal is
deliberately utopian, Sablons successor, Bob Browaeys, said recently. (Sablon retired from the FA in 2012.)
One hundred percent possession of the ball.
In practice, G-A-G means standardization. All over Belgium these days, boys and girls grow up playing soccer
the same way. Every school, youth academy, and village team plays the same formation 4-3-3, with classic,
dribbling wingers and follows the same progression up to the 11-on-a-side game. Kids under the age of 7
play 2-on-2; under-9s play 5-on-5; under-11s play 8-on-8. They never use more than half the field. It is only
when theyre 12 years old that boys and girls are finally introduced to a full-size pitch and the idea of a long
pass.
It hasnt been easy. Amateur clubs grouse about change and squabble over money. Young Belgian teams also
lose a lot. Its harder to be utopian than it is to play the offside trap. It takes some five or six years for our
youth teams, Sablon said. They play open. They are attacking all the time. They lose, but that is not our
problem The identity and the development of the players is much more important than that.
When I spoke to coaches of Belgiums professional teams, no one disputed the impact of Sablons plan. It was
there in the PowerPoint presentations they showed to parents of boys entering their academies, and it was there
when I walked into King Baudouin Stadium the morning before the Ivory Coast match and saw the Red Devils
running their drills. The entire squad, except for the goalkeepers, was crammed into a coned-out section of the
pitch between the midfield line and the edge of the penalty area. In teams of 12, they were playing two-touch
and trying to keep the ball from each other. Circulation de balle is played wherever soccer is taught in Belgium,
and the worlds fourth-most expensive team at this summers World Cup was going at it like 9-year-olds. No
goals, no direction of play, just swarming up and down, looking for neat passes, throwing themselves at
interceptions. Whenever the ball went out of bounds, Coach Wilmots, who stood amid his players like a man
feeding pigeons in the park, dropped another ball in, and the flock went at it again.

3. Belgium and the Economic Pecking Order of European Soccer
G-A-G isnt the end of the story. It might not even be the beginning. This is Belgium, after all, where stories are
fragmented and nobody agrees on the order of things. It also happens to be a very active corner of Europes
multibillion-dollar soccer market, and some experts see the Red Devils rise as a natural outgrowth of sporting
capitalism. You often hear this from Belgiums professional clubs, and one afternoon I took the train out to the
countrys far eastern border to visit a team called KRC Genk.
Genk is a former coal-mining town. Beyond its borders, the perfect triangles of slag heaps stand around in the
sunshine. Being Flemish, its team, Racing Genk, carries the prefix Koninklijke. (Clubs in Belgiums
Francophone south use the prefix Royal.) Influenced from its founding by Dutch football and, in particular, by
the model of Ajax Amsterdam, KRC Genk won Belgiums Jupiler League championship in 2011. Results have
been patchier since then, but the club, like Ajax, is admired across Europe for its knack for finding
extraordinary young players in its youth academy. Christian Benteke, Thibaut Courtois, and Kevin De Bruyne
(a young, two-footed midfielder sold by Chelsea to Wolfsburg for $25.3 million this January) all came through
Genk, and when I toured the clubs shining, box-fresh facilities, its youth director, Roland Breugelmans,
pointed out their names printed on the wall.
That is the reason why we can grow, he said. The sales of Courtois and De Bruyne in 2012 enabled the club
to add another floor to its training complex. When I asked Breugelmans how Genk managed to discover players
like this in a quiet, postindustrial corner of Belgium and with just 220 boys in the clubs youth program, he
replied: We have no choice.
The golden generation is a romantic old saw in soccer, but what has happened at KFC Genk suggests that
Belgiums flowering of talent has more to do with economic specialization than a serendipitous glut of natural-
born talent. Next to the leagues of Spain, England, and Germany, Belgiums professional game is tiny and
inherently constrained. Thirty-four teams play for a perennially divided television audience of 6 million Flemish
and 4.5 million French speakers. The most successful Belgian teams get broadcast revenues worth about $6.8
million per season. By contrast, the bottom club in the English Premier League got $128.4 million for its 2013-
14 rights. Competing in an open market with other European clubs whose budgets are five, six, or 10 times
greater than the wealthiest Belgian teams budgets, professional soccer in Belgium is subject to the constant,
unthinking erosion of other peoples money.
The only way for Belgian teams to survive financially has been to cultivate young talent and then cash it in with
transfers to wealthier foreign clubs. This is Belgiums competitive niche, and coaches and clubs have gotten
very, very good at it. It is our business model, said Jean-Francois De Sart, the technical director of Standard
Liege, currently Belgiums top side. As usual, Liege is expected to sell its best player, a young forward named
Michy Batshuayi, this summer. I asked De Sart if this endless unearthing, nurturing, and selling of players
without ever seeing the final result of his labors depressed him. No, he said. We try to improve our
budget, but, OK, it is also the way to make, to live a life We know in which world we are in.
And in many ways, the Red Devils of 2014 are the payoff. Belgiums domestic clubs might be too small and too
poor to retain the players they have developed, but now, at last, there is a chance for everything to come
together. Other countries have already done this. The top French and Dutch players have been playing abroad
for 20 years or more. But this is the first Belgian generation to successfully graduate, en masse, to Europes top
teams. Maybe that is why it feels like an achievement. It is special, said De Sart, who used to run the national
youth teams under Sablon. In England they dont need young players. They dont need to invest They will
do it, but they dont need to. We need it. Absolutely.

4. The New Belgians
So there has been a plan. There has been the ruthless capitalism of the worlds most popular sport. But there has
also been a third impetus shaping Belgiums World Cup team, and that is immigration. The morning before the
match, watching the squad go through its G-A-G routines at the national stadium, it was impossible not to be
struck by the contrast between the all-white coaching staff, the mixed ethnicity of the players (the current Red
Devils have roots from Morocco to Indonesia, Martinique to Congo), and the crowd that had come to watch.
Like every country in Europe, Belgium has been the subject of waves of immigration since the late 1960s.
(Around 20 percent of the current population is foreign-born.) But soccer has always been unusually present
as a tool, mirror, and binding agent in Belgiums attempts to adapt to a new kind of society. In turn, from
the pioneering hired guns in the Jupiler League to the kids growing up in rough parts of Brussels and Lige,
Congolese and Moroccan players have changed the way the nation plays football. More intricacy. More feints.
More urban. More freestyle. Michel Sablon recognized this when he overhauled the countrys approach to the
game a decade ago. The phrase le football de rue (street soccer) is everywhere in Belgian FA documents.
Browaeys, Sablons successor, speaks of the childlike pleasure of the game played this way. And after they
finished the possession game at the stadium, it was possible to see the Belgian players enjoying themselves.
In their next drill, a player swept the ball from the center circle deep out to the wing, where a teammate had to
control it with a single touch inside a small box of cones, and then return a cross for the first player to score.
The crowd whooped and groaned as Kompany, Benteke, and Fellaini took turns throwing themselves at errant
crosses and burying the ball in the net. The real pleasure, however, was in watching that first controlling touch:
the extravagant neatness of Hazard, Witsel, and Everton winger Kevin Mirallas; the athletic OCD to leap and
command the ball in such a narrow space, then run all the way around it, and then smack it somewhere else. On
the way back to my room that night, near Brusselss main railway station, I saw a couple kids playing a nearly
identical game in the street. They were taking two touches no more and bending their bodies to fit rules of
their own devising. The pointless joy of that composition.
Of course, there is more going on with le football de rue in Belgium than step-overs and quick hips and drag-
backs. The current team has drawn comparisons to Frances World Cup champion rainbow team of 1998
as a symbol of multicultural possibility. However, this being Belgium, a vaguely constructed nation whose
population has never truly embraced Belgian identity in the first place, it can feel foolish to make any sweeping
statements about society and what such things symbolize. Sometimes it can feel crazy to even ask questions.
After the players had finished training that morning, we all trooped to a press briefing and listened to the usual
blandishments. Kompany and Wilmots, switching between French and Dutch, talked about the belief and the
spirit in the squad and the skill of the Ivorian players. Then I asked Wilmots to compare the team he was
managing to the Belgian teams he had played for in the 1990s. He looked at me as if I were daft. What kind of
a question is that? he snapped. Wilmots batted the microphone away in irritation. I dont speak about the past.
I speak about the future. Its the same for the players. They will write their own history.

5. The Last Belgians
Belgium can be a bit like that. Theres so much going on beneath the surface. Being there reminded me of a
household where the parents have separated but decided to remain in the same home because it makes financial
sense. From the outside, it might seem like a sensible arrangement, but on the inside there are all these
uncrossable lines the inhabitants have internalized an unseen tracery of sadness, of love that did not last. In a
way, thats Belgium.
One night, the sportswriter Raf Willems tried to explain it to me. We met in Lier, about 30 miles north of
Brussels, the hometown of Jan Ceulemans, the most capped player in Belgiums history. Willems has written 30
books about soccer, including, most recently, one about Belgian players in the Premier League. Belgium is one
of the best countries to live in the world, he said. But we dont know it. We think it is really bad to live here.
The condensed version goes like this: For many centuries, the land north of France was a quilt of duchies, cities,
and bishoprics that marked the border between Romance (French, Latin) and Germanic Europe. People spoke
Frisian, Dutch, French, German, and Luxembourgian. After the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815, the great powers of
Europe tried to stitch the Netherlands and the Southern Netherlands groups of provinces that had split on
religious grounds two centuries earlier into a single country. But it didnt work. It came apart again. What
was left was Belgium. It is a little bit said Willems. He paused. It is not a real country.
Back then, the invented nation named after the Belges, a long-lost Celtic tribe was dominated by a
French-speaking liberal elite who opened banks and railways and laid down rules for the Flemish-speaking
yokels in the fields. But ever since, the pendulum has been swinging the other way, with the countrys Flemish
majority (around 60 percent of the population) steadily asserting its linguistic, economic, and political power,
while the French speakers have hung on for dear life. The result is a constantly shifting, almost perfectly
incomprehensible experiment in compromise an antidote to nationalism and a magnet for surrealists. There is
the Flemish north, the French-speaking south, and the shared capital of Brussels, which has its own parliament.
(Everyone hates Brussels, explained Willems, but they are proud of themselves.) The country is governed
through a riddle of regions that are communities and communities that arent regions. And dont get smart and
think that Belgium is bilingual, or even trilingual, because of its 74,000 German speakers. This is the land of
official dual monolingualism. That is our absurdism, said Willems. Belgium is an absurd country. That is a
statement, you know that?
The official line is that soccer has somehow managed to steer clear of all this. The king and football are the
only things that hold the country together goes the popular clich. In reality, the sport has been as contested as
everything else. The game was introduced by French urban elites in the 1880s. They insisted on administering it
in the French language, even after the Flemish masses had also started playing. By the late 1920s a time of
general Flemish activism a referee named Jules Vranken had decided he was fed up and established a rival
Flemish Football Association. Clubs with a Flemish character, affiliate with us and break off from the Belgian
association, he appealed. Our success depends on you.
And for a time, it appeared as if soccer like Belgiums school system, its bar association, and its Boy Scouts
would split along linguistic lines. More than 400 clubs defected. The bifurcation might have become
permanent, but then Flemish football took a turn for the fascist. Vranken was succeeded by Robert Verbelen, a
right-wing nationalist who admired the sporting intensity of Hitlers Germany and who would go on to found
the Flemish SS after the Nazi invasion of 1940. A great miracle took place, Verbelen wrote that summer in
Volk en Staat, a Flemish nationalist newspaper. Out of the east there came a people, a superior broedervolk
(fraternal people) Flemish people will not stay behind. After the war, Verbelen fled to Austria and soccer
separatism disappeared with him. The Belgian FA published its rules in Dutch, and football became strikingly
national and harmonious. The only unwritten rule, present in the mind of every Red Devils coach, was to pick a
roughly equal number of Flemish and French-speaking players. Crowds watching the national team chanted in
English to circumvent the language problem.
This was the unhappily balanced environment into which immigrants, mainly from around the Mediterranean
Sea and North Africa, but also from farther south, began arriving in large numbers in the late 1980s. The
demographic shift was a shock, particularly in Belgiums urban centers, many of which had aging, shrinking
populations. Unlike in, for example, Paris, the poorer districts of many Belgian cities are centrally located, so
the newcomers young Africans, Turks, and Moroccans, looking for work and bearing children were
particularly visible. A series of immigrant riots, mainly over joblessness and cramped housing, shook the
country in the spring of 1991. Immigration also forced many ordinary Belgians to confront their countrys
colonial shame in Congo. Between 1885 and 1908, the enormous central African state, 80 times the size of
Belgium, was owned as a personal possession of the Belgian King Leopold II. Millions of Congolese died in a
genocidal rubber production program that made Belgium rich.
There is a moment of the history where one doesnt speak about, Johan Leman, a Belgian anthropologist, told
me. That is the Leopold II period. Like most of his generation, the only image Leman had of Congo growing
up was as a model African village essentially a human zoo he saw at the Brussels World Fair in 1958.
Congo became independent two years later, but in the late 1980s the nation began to drift into civil war
prompting an exodus of mostly educated, middle-class Congolese to their highly ambivalent former colonizer.
In 1989, Leman was put in charge of drawing up Belgiums first-ever migrants policy to help integrate the new
society.
And one of Lemans solutions was soccer. The idea was, OK, we will not find employment immediately for all
these young people, he said. Not that all people would become engineers. But you can create hope, and sport
is one of these instruments. You can create role models in such districts [and] also role models with some
significance for the people outside. So Leman started persuading crowded municipalities to build the sturdy,
concrete soccer cages that now exist all over Belgium. Football, he said. It was really obvious to play that
card The only thing you needed was a piece of field.
You cant draw a straight line from Belgiums waves of immigration and Lemans soccer cages to the Red
Devils going to Brazil this summer, but you also cant ignore the connection. Of the present team, Marouane
Fellaini, Mousa Dembele (the Tottenham Hotspur midfielder), Anthony Vanden Borre, and Vincent Kompany
are all sons of African immigrants, and they all grew up playing le football de rue. In 2013, Kompany bought a
street soccer club in Brussels, renamed it Brussels BX, and established a system of financial incentives to
persuade players to go to school.
The link with Congo is even plainer. Romelu Lukaku, the Chelsea striker currently on loan at Everton, who will
lead the line for Belgium this summer in the absence of Benteke, is the son of Roger Lukaku, who played for
Zaire at the 1994 World Cup. Benteke is the son of a former Congolese military commander. Vanden Borre was
born there, while Kompanys father, Pierre, was a student revolutionary who fled the country in 1968. The
name Kompany comes from the familys former servitude to a Belgian silver mine. I think the impact is not
small or medium, said Lichtenstein, the agent, when we spoke about Congos part in the rise of Belgian
football. I think that the Congolese people and the country of Congo can feel that they have a big participation
in the success, and the proudness, and the results, and the talent, that we have in our national team.
Since he wrote his policy, Leman has seen Belgian society undergo profound changes. Brussels is now the
youngest region in the country; more than half its residents are from overseas. Young black men like Kompany
and the pop singer Stromae, whose father was killed in the Rwandan genocide, are continentwide celebrities
stone-cold, famous Belgians.
And heres the thing: The new Belgians dont really get the Flemish-French angst situation. They quite like
Belgium as it is. Before I went to Brussels, I read a 1998 academic paper by two historians at the Free
University of Brussels titled Are Immigrants the Last Belgians? It described the national outlook in typically
self-deprecating terms: There was no Belgian dream. Belgium was often a non-choice But the article
also put forward the idea that the countrys newest citizens might be the first to truly accept Belgium on its own
eccentric terms. Leman believes that theory has come true. How to explain? he said. Our national
discussions are internal discussions, and very domestic, and these guys coming from outside look at Belgium
and they say, Why destroy this country? With its nice system?
The word for this new, younger patriotism is Belgitude. Plenty of older Belgians remain skeptical of it. That
is, after all, their ideological default. I despise my own past and that of others, wrote the artist Magritte. I
despise resignation, patience, professional heroism, and all the obligatory sentiments. I also despise the
decorative arts, folklore, advertising, radio announcers voices, aerodynamics, the Boy Scouts, the smell of
naphtha, the news, and drunks.
Its a tough crowd, no doubt. But Belgiums soccer team does represent a powerful kind of wholeness in its
excellence, in its youth, in its disconnection from the countrys internecine hang-ups, and in its presentation
within the feel-good vernacular of world soccer. Its as if the kids growing up in their parents sad and divided
house decided to be a family, after all. The myth and foundation of Belgium is lacking, Leman said. And of
course it is not a football team that will create this narrative. But believe me, if they arrive among the last eight,
and surely if they arrive among the last four teams in Brazil, you will see what happens in Brussels, eh?
6. Come On, Feel the Belgitude
Lets not get carried away. This is still Belgium. On the morning of the Ivory Coast match, I went to meet Ben
Weyts, vice-president of the NVA, the countrys main Flemish party, who is also a soccer fan. By then I had
been in the country a few days, and I was developing a sense for its near-constant, low-frequency peculiarity.
Every morning in the street outside the apartment where I was staying, I walked past a smart steel platform
mounted with a trumpet. Nobody ever blew it. The metro entrance was decorated with a case of mammoth and
elk bones. When I got to the Belgian Parliament, a sign on the building told me it was the former headquarters
of the countrys railway company. A large model train was on display in the lobby. This stuff gets to you in
Belgium. You end up wondering how seriously to take anything.
That is definitely how people like Weyts see Belgitude and Belgium, in a way. The NVA isnt extreme. It
gets 17 percent of the national vote and 28 percent in Flanders, which makes it the countrys largest political
party, and it doesnt want Belgium to break up overnight. It campaigns instead for a gradual sense of drift called
confederalism and for Belgium to dissolve peacefully over several decades. (It wont say how many.)
Necessary in Flanders, Useful in Europe is the partys slogan, emphasizing its complex local and
supranational loyalties. But the line might as well be: Why fake it, Belgium? Its just not happening. And
thats what Weyts thinks when he watches the Red Devils. Of course I support them, he deadpanned to me.
There is no other national team that has as many Flemish players.
Weyts almost sounded as if he felt sorry for the young, fabulously gifted players being forced to pull on the
national teams red jerseys and represent such an illogical construct. They think, I am part of the Belgian
football team, I should promote Belgium too, he said. But in fact, in reality, in Belgian society, there is a
division. And whether you want to promote a nonexistent Belgian identity or not, I dont care. But in fact, you
see that you get two different types of people. You have the Flemish, and you have the French-speaking. And
they are each going their own way. Is that a problem? I dont think so.
Few people I spoke to in Belgium expected the feel-good vibes around the Red Devils or hip symbols like
Stromae (his song Ta Fte is the countrys official World Cup anthem) to have any noticeable impact on the
level of separatist feeling in this months parliamentary elections, which will occur a few weeks before the
tournament begins. Yet there is still something faintly unreal about watching Belgiums largest political party
face off, however politely, with one of its most popular national symbols.
People in Belgium still talk a lot about an exchange that took place in 2012 between Vincent Kompany
and NVA chairman Bart De Wever. On winning electoral control of the Flemish city of Antwerp, De Wever
told the partys supporters: Antwerp is for everybody, but tonight, especially for us. A few days later, after
winning a World Cup qualifier in Scotland, Kompany tweeted in response: Belgium is for everybody, but
tonight, especially for us! and was widely seen to have come out the bigger man.
It still bothers the NVA. Kompany is widely expected to enter politics when he retires from football a
symbol of a new, united Belgium. I asked Weyts what he thought of him. Just hit the ball, he said. Thats it.
And try to make a goal.
I got to the stadium about an hour before kickoff. The streets were full of thousands of people in red devil horns
and synthetic Afros a homage to Fellaini painted in the Belgian tricolor. Between the merchandise, the
neatly painted faces, and the thick smell of sausages and French fries, it was impossible to figure out if
underneath it all, this long-divided country was finding some unlikely, low-risk way to be happy by way of the
globalized, generic code of 21st-century world soccer. I bought a beer and met a Flemish student named Thijs.
He seemed to think so: I know it sounds stupid that football can unite a country, but its really happening. The
crowds poured past. Thijs talked about Stromae and Belgitude and, above all, Kompany. He is a football
player, he said. But he looks beyond.
Inside, the Red Devils were going through their familiar drills. Circulation de balle. A Stromae song was
playing. On the opposite side of the field, the experienced Ivory Coast team of Didier Drogba and Yaya Tour,
another golden generation, long familiar with the weight of hope, warmed up in full-length bright orange
tracksuits. We stood, and the crowd made it Im not sure how through the alternating French, Dutch, and
German lines of Belgiums national anthem.
After days of talking about the meaning of Belgian football, it was a relief to just watch the team play. Within a
few minutes, the Red Devils got their circulation going. The Afros of Witsel and Fellaini zigzagged up and
down the pitch at a more or less constant distance, like atoms connected by an invisible force. Wall passes
snapped off Mirallas on the right wing and Dries Mertens on the left, looking to set Benteke through, or to catch
De Bruyne sprinting into the play from behind. The Ivorians couldnt keep track. Fellaini was playing with the
freedom of being away from Manchester, and finally, 34 minutes in, he flung himself at a corner and scored a
header to give the Red Devils the lead. The crowd, contented but short of a common language, found a perfectly
Belgian solution by humming Verdis Triumphal March. Led by Kompany, whose every tackle and
interception was met with cheers, the team played out the half with a swagger.
In the press room, Belgiums football writers werent surprised. Screens showed Belgiums nine shots on goal
to Ivory Coasts zero. I found Raf Willems eating a pastry. He was there researching his next book. I
remembered what he had told me a few days before, about the brand-new, frankly un-Belgian confidence of
these players. Now we want to dominate the game and we want to win the World Cup, he had said. They
want to win the World Cup! They became the state of mind for Belgium for the 21st century. Two minutes
into the second half, Benteke missed a gaping chance. But in Belgiums next attack, the Ivorian keeper couldnt
prevent a savage cross from Radja Nainggolan, the son of an Indonesian father and one of Belgiums fringe
players, from crashing into the net. Two-nil. Everyone began to think about the tougher teams waiting in Brazil.
And then something strange happened. Or maybe, because this was Belgium, it wasnt strange at all. The game
went loose. The tight patterns of the first half began to fray, and suddenly Manchester Citys other star, the
Ivorian midfielder Tour, began to pick up the pieces. The visitors canny tackles and fouls broke the Belgians
rhythm. The crowd became distracted. Wilmots sent Eden Hazard on, and he was cut down in a heap on his first
touch. Ten minutes later, Didier Drogba scuffed in a goal for Ivory Coast, and the last 15 minutes became nervy
and ill-formed. It looked as if the Red Devils, now playing through Hazard, could score at any moment, but also
as if they were growing more vulnerable at the same time. Decisions went awry. It was the Vuitton Generation
all over again. In the 84th minute, Lukaku and Mertens missed two chances to put the game away. Trumpets
blasted nervously from the stands. In injury time, the Belgian defense failed to clear a free kick, and Ivorian
winger Max Gradel rolled the equalizer into the corner. The shot was slow, but precise. Courtois didnt move.
No one knew what to say after the game. It was supposed to be the Red Devils triumphant send-off, a warning
of what they might achieve this summer. Instead, it brought back familiar doubts about the young teams
seriousness, the abandoning of old virtues, and the unlikeliness of this new and happy Belgium. The stadium
emptied quickly. It was a bit stupid, Courtois told reporters after the game. A bit frustrating. Kompany was
calmer. The first half was under control, he said. They didnt have any chances. That is the benchmark. It
was good that everyone was disappointed. There is pressure, Kompany added, but its good pressure. The
captain thanked everyone. He said goodnight, and the players boarded their bus before dispersing again across
the continent back to their billion-dollar clubs, their Champions League showdowns. In a month or two,
these glimmering pieces of an unmade nation would reassemble for Brazil. And I walked to the metro, where I
found a silent army of confused, face-painted, flag-draped Belgians, waiting for a ride home.