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Just back in the first division after forty-eight years of absence, the Brussels club enchants the country with its unexpected performances and the good humor of its supporters.
This morning of Sunday February 13, like every match day for Union Saint-Gilloise (USG), Fabrizio Basano stops for a pastis in a café in the very popular Marolles market in Brussels. Then he goes up the “unionist walk” from the bars of the parvis Saint-Gilles to the Joseph-Marien stadium. Along the way, he sometimes thinks back to the endless “desert crossing” of his heart club, former glory of Belgian football eleven times crowned champion between 1904 and 1935, which vegetated for forty-eight years in the lower divisions before returning to the elite, in 2021. “At every Union game for thirty years, absolutely every game, there was an old gentleman or an old lady, always someone different, who came to see me and sighed: ‘Mr Fabrizio, do I will one day see the Union in the first division again?” remembers with emotion this fierce supporter, who has not missed a match since the “nineties”.
It seems far, now, the period of lean cows! Freshly promoted, Union Saint-Gilloise are at the top of the championship and have a seven-point lead over the second place with seven games remaining in the regular phase. An unexpected triumph for a team made up of unknown players and endowed with a budget of 13 million euros: a misery in the world of professional football. The story is all the more beautiful, and the epic of the Union Saint-Gilloise arouses overflowing enthusiasm, in Brussels…