5. The Last Belgians
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 country’s 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 aren’t regions. And don’t 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 cliché. 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 Belgium’s 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 Hitler’s 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 Belgium’s 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 country’s 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 doesn’t 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 Belgium’s first-ever migrants’ policy to help integrate the new society.
And one of Leman’s 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 can’t draw a straight line from Belgium’s waves of immigration and Leman’s soccer cages to the Red Devils going to Brazil this summer, but you also can’t 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 Kompany’s father, Pierre, was a student revolutionary who fled the country in 1968. The name “Kompany” comes from the family’s former servitude to a Belgian silver mine. “I think the impact is not small or medium,” said Lichtenstein, the agent, when we spoke about Congo’s 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.”
