By Tony Attwood
- Are Arsenal getting too many injuries, or should we be watching the tactics?
- Club Brugge against Arsenal: how are the opposition doing of late?
There is something wonderful about the history of Jan Breydel, who lived in the late 13th and early 14th century and whose name is given to the stadium in which Arsenal play this week against Club Brugge.
His fame comes from leading a violent revolutionary uprising against a king called Philip the Fair – of whom one of his rivals (Bernard Saisset, bishop of Pamiers), said “He is neither man nor beast. He is a statue.”
However, the story is that Jan Breydel is credited with leading a violent uprising known as the Bruges Matins against Philip the Fair and then did his bit in the Franco-Flemish War.
Unfortunately, not all historians agree on all this, and my knowledge of Flemish history is not as good as it might be (or to put it another way, is pretty feeble verging on negligible) although to my relief, I have found out that not many other people know much about him either. Indeed, even his dates seem to have been pretty much picked out of thin air, rather like notions of Tottenham winning the league.
The city archives of Bruges show Jan Breydel as a meat trader who fought in the Battle of the Golden Spurs, but like most history of Tottenham, there is no concrete evidence that he was present on the battlegrounds or if he was that he did anything to reduce our noisy neighbours to wrecks.
Anyway, as a result of all these shenanigans, Brugge play at the Jan Breydel Stadium, which has a capcity of 29,042, and they are known as the local rivals to Cercle Brugge.
Although not of the size we are used to, the stadium was used for four games in the Euro 2000 tournament. The name was chosen because Jan Breydel was the leader of a Flemish rebellion against the French, and by having a Flemish name, the club could get a grant from the Flemish government for the rebuilding. Or so I am told.
However, yesterday we were told that Brugge had sacked their manager Nicky Hayen after 21 months in charge. The new man at the top is now Ivan Leko, who has come from Gent. He has previously been with Hajduk Split, Malaga and Lokeren as a player, as well as Brugge itself for four years, during which time he won the Belgian Cup.
He is reported to have won only eight of his 19 matches in charge of Gent since his move there in the summer and is now with Brugge for the third time. Indeed it is said that Gent were completely taken aback when Brugge announced that Leko would be Hayen’s successor. In fact, it seems that Nicky Hayen didn’t get round to telling his club chairman, Sam Baro that he was off. But such is the way of football.
So it is all change at Club Brugge, where the club now sit in third place, five points off the lead.
But if all this sounds a bit up and down, as it were, we should respect the fact that the club was founded in 1892, just six years after Arsenal, and Club Brugge are the second-most decorated side in Belgian football history, behind Anderlecht. And to be fair, we should add that all their trophies have come not in the early days when they didn’t have much opposition but rather across their history. Although they spent the first decade after the Second World War in the second division, they did return to the top tier in 1959.
And indeed it was only at the end of the 1960s that they started to win the Belgian cup on a regular basis, and indeed they appeared in the finals of the 1976 UEFA Cup and 1978 European Cup, but they have then had some lean times, although they did win the league in 2023/24 – their sixth win in nine consecutive seasons.
The stadium is known as the Breydel Stadium, named after a folk hero from 14th-century Bruges who led a rebellion against the French.
However, as with so many teams from smaller countries of Europe their economic survival comes from finding and selling players to bigger clubs elsewhere on the continent. Of late, they have sold a range of players for over £60m, and it is the rebuilding of the squad after these sales that has led to disquiet and the manager’s eventual dismissal.
