Beyond The Top 5: Royale USG the newly-promoted team causing a Leicester-esque upset in the Belgian Pro League (Part 1)

The most remarkable and simultaneously under-reported story in all of European football is how Royale Union Saint-Gilloise are dominating the Belgian Jupiler Pro League in their first attempt in 49 years.

Union SG sit top of the Belgian Jupiler Pro League table after 25 games, nine points ahead of defending champions Club Brugge in what has been a truly dominant run.

Union lead the league in almost every major team stat which establishes that this is not a fluke and gives an idea of how good they really are.

They have won 18 league games this season, which is by far the most in the division, four more than the next best test team Antwerp.

Les Unionistes also leads the league in goals scored with 57 and also have the best defence having only shipped 21 goals so far.

Royale Union Saint-Gilloise are historically a big club in Belgium, they sit third on the list of all-time Jupiler Pro League champions with 11 titles to their name, behind only Anderlecht (34) and Club Brugge (17).

The problem with that is the last of those titles was won in 1935 and USG had been on a very rapid decline ever since. They eventually got relegated in 1963, after which they bounced back and forth between the divisions before getting relegated again in 1973, this time more permanently.

The club had pretty much been forgotten in its 48-year absence from the top-flight except for just over 2000 die-hard fans and looked destined to continue wallowing in mediocrity until 2018 when something changed.

Brighton owner, Tony Bloom bought Royale Union Saint-Gilloise in 2018 along with his long-term business associate and friend, Alex Muzio.

Bloom had the reputation, money and precedent after buying Brighton and transforming them from a League One club in a community stadium to a Premier League team at the state of the art, Amex Stadium.

He did so by reportedly investing over £300 million of his own money on facilities and playing personnel, but he was determined to do things differently at Union, a new approach which we will explore shortly.

The season before Bloom bought the club, USG had only escaped relegation to the third tier via the playoff route, which gives a clearer picture of where they were.

Bloom owns 90 per cent of the club while Muzio owns the remaining 10%, but it is the latter who is heavily involved in the day-to-day running of the club while the former favours a more hands-off approach.

The club witnessed immediate improvement under new ownership, jumping from a relegation-battling team to partaking but losing the promotion playoff in the first season under the new bosses.

Slovenian manager Luka Elsner, who led them to that impressive third-place finish, then left at the end of that season after being wooed by French Ligue 1 club Amiens.

They replaced him with Thomas Christiansen, who also left after failing to deliver promotion in his one and only season with a fourth-place finish in 2019/20.

His replacement was Felice Mazzu, the Belgian manager who had been unemployed for over six months at the time but would ultimately prove to be the right one.

Mazzu was a big manager in Belgian football and had been fired by Genk the previous season, which made it a big coup for USG to land someone whose pedigree and experience supersedes theirs.

Royale Union Saint-Gilloise gained automatic promotion by dominating the Belgian Second Division in the 2020/21 season, finishing top of the league with 70 out of 84 possible points to secure their first piece of silverware since they won the third division in 2004.

Despite the frequent managerial turnover, the one constant in USG’s meteoric rise under Bloom and Muzio has been their sporting director Chris O'Loughlin.

O’Loughlin bought into the data-driven approach to running the club which was Bloom and Muzio’s modus operandi. USG are famous for carefully targeting players based on certain parameters that could sometimes see them scout a target for as long as 10 months to see if he is a perfect fit.

USG mainly targets two kinds of players: talented young players who are deemed surplus to requirements by bigger clubs, and outstanding talents in lower leagues across Europe who have been overlooked by big clubs.

The third and probably most important parameter is that the players fit in both culturally and ideologically. O’Loughlin has been known to pull out of potential transfer deals when he feels unimpressed by the player’s attitude.

Even while playing in the Belgian Second Division, Union were very cautious of players treating them as a stepping stone, which is why they only go for talented players who buy into their ideology. This is a big reason they have been able to adapt rather seamlessly to the Belgian Pro League.

To be continued...