1974-2024, 50 years of Pro League (series): and the most powerful clubs created professional football in Belgium

The Premier League, created in 1992, has become a war machine. Here’s how…

In Belgium, we prefer to play overtime. “Regulations regarding professionalism will only be established when the need arises.”stipulates article 40 of the new regulations of the Belgian Union, drawn up in 1913. At the time, a “professionalism commission” will even investigate nine players, most of them from the Union Saint-Gilloise, the champion, suspected to receive bonuses!

Raymond Braine, punished because of his coffee

In 1925, the federation let go: it voted to authorize “a possible reimbursement of the players’ shortfall”, who, when they played, inevitably did not work. But it is, on the other hand, strengthening its measures against the exploitation of the names and photos of footballers. Raymond Braine is paying the price: the Beerschot striker is suspended because he made the mistake of operating a… café, “Le Matador” in Antwerp! The “villain” uses his notoriety to enrich himself. Ouuuuh… And too bad for the Devils who played their first World Cup, in 1930 in Uruguay, without their best player… In July of that year, Raymond Braine signed for Sparta Prague, in Czechoslovakia, and became the first professional footballer Belgian to play for a foreign club. Wheat is more available elsewhere…

Raymond Braine, first Belgian professional footballer, in the Beerschot jersey.

In 1935, a new development with the transition to “semi-pro”: the Belgian Union voted for the status of independent footballer. A player can now receive compensation from his club (regulating a situation that existed for years) but without making Football his main job. And the federation also opens the transfer market: clubs can now sell and acquire players for a fee.

For many years, our football lived on this status, full of hypocrisy. In 1958, after Standard’s first title, its president Paul Henrard said: “Standard is a professional club!” More and more voices were raised to demand more rights. At the beginning of the 1960s, new scales emerged. But they are considered insufficient by the clubs of the first two divisions (an annual shortfall of 42,000 Belgian francs maximum could in particular be granted to a player who trained during the day, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., etc.), who decided to coming together in 1964 within a National League, to assert their rights. But very quickly, dissensions appeared and the most powerful teams began the inevitable shift towards professional football…

Liège, the nineteenth Pro League club under foreign flag: why is Belgian football the second most attractive in Europe for investors?

Creation of the Professional League in 1973

In Belgium, the Professional Football League was born in 1973. Many years after England (1885), but also France (1935), the Netherlands (1956) and Germany (1963). The fruit of the rivalry between Roger Petit and a Ghent notary, René Hoste, who was the president of the National League. The strong man of Standard, then also vice-president of the Belgian Union, created a dissidence. Under his leadership, and the active support of Constant Vanden Stock, president of Anderlecht after having been national coach, nine clubs (Antwerp, Daring, Club Bruges, FC Liégeois, Ghent, Standard, Anderlecht and the two Carolos clubs, Sporting and Olympic ) left the League, joined, a few months later, by six other teams (Beerschot, Beringen, Beveren, Cercle Bruges, Lierse and Lokeren).

Roger Petit, the strong man of Standard, is at the origin of the creation of professional football in Belgium. — Roger Petit (who is reading his newspaper Les Sports in this photo) was, for 39 years, general secretary of Standard de Liège. ©DH

Roger Petit was the first president of the new “Grouping of Clubs with Professional and International Interests”, for four years, before resigning with a bang following a disagreement between… FC Bruges and Anderlecht concerning the acquisition of Michel Renquin .

The Liégeois chaired the first session of the Professional League, on January 27, 1973 at the restaurant of the Amigo hotel, in the center of Brussels. “Roger Petit brought together the most prominent clubs in the kingdom with a view to making them more professional, confided, in the DHAntwerp Eddy Wauters, the youngest member of the assembly, who wrote the first minutes. The goal of the Pro League was to be cooperation in order to progress football in Belgium. We were looking for how we could help each other, create income for clubs that didn’t have much. (Bruges, champion in 1973, was, for example, on the verge of bankruptcy) because there was practically no sponsorship and TV rights at the time. The main revenue was stadium tickets. We were already talking about the League Cup. We tried to postpone matches to avoid competition. The first measure was to increase the D1 from sixteen to twenty clubs so that each circle had the revenue from nineteen home matches. This is how Sporting de Charleroi, ranked fourteenth in D2, was catapulted to D1 because it had opted for the path of professionalism. The experience of twenty only lasted a year…”

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Professionalism is only viable for half a dozen clubs. Others’ revenues are too meager to meet the demands of this millionaires’ football…

Charleroi artificially promoted

The goal was therefore to bring D2 clubs with a professional vocation into D1. To arrive at twenty clubs in 1974-1975, we took the first fourteen from the previous D1 championship, won by Anderlecht; the first three of D2 (the champion, Olympic Charleroi; its runner-up, AS Ostend and the third, Lokeren); Sporting de Charleroi, fourteenth and which had narrowly avoided falling into D3 but which was in the nails “administratively”; and we organized playoffs (already!) between four clubs, the last two of the 1973-1974 D1 and the clubs ranked fourth and fifth in D2 in order to keep two teams (Lierse and Winterslag go to D1; Eupen and Saint-Trond will play in D2). Twenty, the accounts will be good… With a notable absentee: La Gantoise, yet one of the clubs at the origin of the project, which finished… last in D2 and goes down to D3 for the first time in its history.

Sporting Anderlecht 1973-1974, last champion — Sporting Anderlecht 1973-1974, last “semi-pro” champion of Belgium.

D2 clubs grimace when this elite is formed. “We don’t want to commit suicide, launch their representatives. Professionalism is only viable for half a dozen clubs. Others’ revenues are too meager to meet the demands of this ‘millionaire’ football…”

Twenty clubs are two too many

On Saturday January 26, 1974, an emergency meeting was called at federal headquarters. Roger Petit already wants to reduce the size: from twenty clubs in 1974-75 in D1, we will go to nineteen the following season and to eighteen in 1976-1977. There were therefore three descendants in 1975 (Diest, Winterslag and Olympic) and in 1976 (Berchem, RC Malines and La Louvière which, fourteenth, was saved sportingly but was demoted for corruption following the “Jurion affair”).

In the summer of 1974, a few weeks after the title of Sporting Anderlecht led by the Hungarian Attila Ladinsky (top scorer), the last champion of our first semi-professional division, the first D1 championship of the Professional League was launched. The Belgian Union adapted its statutes in February, now integrating three categories of players: the professional joined the amateur and the non-amateur (the founding act of the Professional League appeared in the Moniteur Belge on June 4, 1977). Money in football is no longer taboo. It can now circulate with complete or almost complete transparency…