In the stadium of the most beautiful team in the world

If anyone has grown tired of following European football between illegal betting, Superleague and various watchmen-and-robbers rhetoric, Royale Union Saint Gilloise is the club for you. The Brussels team - more specifically from the Saint Gilles district of the capital, located in a hilly area in the southwest, all Art Nouveau and wooden wine stores - is one of the most unconventional football clubs in Europe. The club has a strong focus on sustainability and civil rights, the fans are characterized by politeness and discipline and the club follows a meticulous player trading system to acquire players.

A sporting project that triumphs both on and off the pitch, as the last few days have shown. The team coached by Alexander Blessin, the former Genoa coach, beat Anderlecht for the eighth time in a row, this time 2:1 at home in the quarter-finals of the Belgian Cup, confirming their superiority in the hierarchy of local football against one of the country's most traditional clubs. And in the Juliper league, USG is currently in first place with an eight-point lead and is engaged in the Conference League against Eintracht Frankfurt. And off the pitch, Royale Union Saint Gilloise has also been awarded the B Corp certificate, the sustainability certificate of the American non-profit organization B Lab, which rewards companies for their social and environmental performance.

A major influence on USG's sporting reality in 2018 was Tony Bloom, an English entrepreneur and owner of Brighton & Hove Albion F.C. in the Premier League, who took over the club's majority stake in the Joseph Maria Stadium, a facility with almost 10,000 seats in the Saint Gilles district of Brussels. When I took a look at it before the game against Sint Truiden, the St. Mary's Stadium was, at first glance, what we call an English-style stadium. Nestled in the neighborhood between a park and houses, with beer stands surrounding the entrance gates, attending a USG game is an experience somewhere between retro and Sunday leisure.

There are no barriers, the players chat as they warm up and wave to the fans leaning against the boards, and the Union Boys, the organized fans section - located not in the corners but in the stands, at midfield level - sings in Duden Park without a kick-off. What strikes those who visit Italian stadiums most here is that there seems to be no culture of outrage, of offense, for these fans. They simply cheer, the chants are for the players; the rivalry with the other Brussels teams, especially Molenbeek (a team from one of the city's most multi-ethnic and socially difficult neighborhoods), is limited. And yes, there are families and children in the stands alongside the 'Ultras".

The game begins. The 1980s experience is reflected in the absence of seats in the stands: there are comfortable iron railings for spectators to lean on - it had snowed a few days earlier and at -2 degrees there is a lot of ice - and there is no roofing. In the front rows, children in yellow and blue scarves play, while behind them the parents all hold glasses of Jupiler beer, the brand that sponsors the championship, which they then take back to the various stands at the end of the game. The game goes off without any insults or jibes from the fans, either to each other or to the opposing players. There are hardly any protests against the referee and, to be honest, some fans are more concerned about the fate of the team, which has been decimated by the African Cup of Nations, which has taken away, among others, Algerian striker Mohammed Amoura, who has already scored 13 goals this season.

Amoura is a reflection of the ideal results of player trading, which for years has allowed the club to receive very high wages for players who were previously very poorly paid. Amoura was bought by Lugano to replace Victor Boniface, a center forward that USG bought from Bodo/Glimt in 2021 and then sold to Bayer Leverkusen for €20.5 million last summer. Boniface is now the fourth-highest scorer in the Bundesliga, while Amoura appears to be being pursued by a number of international clubs, according to football market sites. It would be a shame if he were to leave: People have already committed to him, as they have to many others. At half-time, I speak to Antoine, who was a fan of the team long before Bloom arrived. He tells me that many fans come to the stadium early to shake hands with the players, talk to them and cheer each other on. That's the sense of community at USG and at Duden Park. Then an incident happens that confirms that maybe it really is us, we in football of maximum systems, leagues and billionaire transfers, who are doing something wrong.

On Saturday, January 19, AC Milan goalkeeper Mike Maignan walked off the pitch at the Bluepower Arena in Udine after the game was interrupted due to racist chanting by home fans. An incident for which criminal proceedings were initiated. Here, in Europe's seventh league by value, the atmosphere is completely different. At the Joseph Marien Stadium in Brussels, the referee stopped the game for a few seconds about ten minutes into the second half because Daiki Hashioka, the Sint Truiden winger, had been hit on the head with a snowball by a child. The referee asked Burgess, the USG captain, to speak to the fans and the player actually imitated the gesture of throwing the ball and shouted 'stop'. The game continued, nobody complained and after Kevin Rodriguez, center forward of the Ecuadorian national team, scored the 2-1 final score in the 96th minute, many people threw snowballs, both on the pitch and in the stands.

This incident made me think about how certain societies experience football. The USG community is inclusive, it leaves no room for racism, it is neither violent nor vulgar, the fans go to the stadium to celebrate with the players - who sing a chorus together just a few meters from the stands at the end of the game - and at most drink a ton of beer - without throwing plastic, by the way. At USG, the news that captain Christian Burgess, an Englishman with a Labor Party membership card, is a self-confessed vegan didn't raise any laughs on social media. He is practically a metaphor on the pitch for what stadium-goers believe in. The USG is a very different sporting world to the one we are used to in the Italian leagues. Maybe that's why they're called hipsters. And indeed, as beautiful as it is, it's also tremendously unconventional. We should try it too.