In the 71st minute at the Etihad on November 9, 2025, Jérémy Doku received the ball forty yards from Liverpool’s goal, took one touch inside Andy Robertson, and started running. He did not stop running until he had cut between two centre-backs and slid the ball under Alisson Becker for the third goal in Manchester City’s 3-0 win over the defending Premier League champions. The Premier League’s official communications channel later named him Player of the Matchweek. He was twenty-three years old. Six years earlier, he had been a youth-team winger at RSC Anderlecht.
The route from Anderlecht’s Neerpede academy to a Saturday-night solo goal at the Etihad is not unusual. It is the modal export profile of Belgian football. Anderlecht to Stade Rennais in 2020, Rennes to Manchester City in 2023, Belgium senior team since 2020 — Doku’s career is a reasonably typical example of a pipeline that has, since approximately 2010, supplied Europe’s elite leagues with a starting eleven’s worth of useful players every transfer window. Eden Hazard out of Lille via the Tubize academy. Kevin De Bruyne out of Genk. Romelu Lukaku out of Anderlecht. Thibaut Courtois out of Genk. Youri Tielemans out of Anderlecht. Jérémy Doku himself. Leandro Trossard out of Genk. Amadou Onana, raised at Lille after his move from La Gantoise. Charles De Ketelaere out of Brugge. Romeo Lavia out of Anderlecht. Loïs Openda out of Brugge. Malick Fofana out of La Gantoise. Aster Vranckx out of Mechelen.
The list is, by any reasonable per-capita measure, absurd. Belgium has a population of approximately 11.7 million. Within the small-nation talent-factory category, the country is the most reliable producer: the comparable nations — Netherlands, Portugal, Croatia — have peaks and troughs, generations that arrive together and depart together. Belgium’s pipeline has, for fifteen years, simply continued.
The Golden Generation — the cohort centred on Hazard, De Bruyne, Lukaku, Courtois, Vincent Kompany, Toby Alderweireld, Jan Vertonghen, Axel Witsel — has now aged out. Hazard retired on October 10, 2023, at thirty-two. De Bruyne, thirty-four, has played his last competitive season at Manchester City and is now in the United States. Courtois, thirty-three, remains the starter at Real Madrid. Lukaku, thirty-two, is in Italy. The supposed end of the era was meant to produce a Belgian football crisis, in roughly the way Spain’s post-Xavi-and-Iniesta period produced a years-long international malaise. It has not. The current Belgium senior squad contains eight players under twenty-five who would start for a top-six Premier League club. The pipeline did not depend on the Golden Generation. The Golden Generation was a product of the pipeline.
This piece is an attempt to describe what the pipeline is, structurally, and why it has continued to function.
Four Academies, One Method
The institutional answer is that Belgium does not have one talent-development model — it has four serious ones, run in mild competition with each other, all of which have built reputations on producing sellable elite-level players within four-to-six-year cycles.
Anderlecht’s Neerpede academy is the oldest and most decorated. Vincent Kompany, Romelu Lukaku, Youri Tielemans, Romeo Lavia, Jérémy Doku — every one of them passed through Neerpede in their teenage years. The methodology, refined under the late academy director Jean Kindermans through the 2010s, emphasised technical work in tight spaces and structured small-sided games over physical development before age sixteen. The bet was that a Belgian sixteen-year-old who could receive under pressure with both feet and play a 4-v-3 in a small grid would, by twenty-one, be more useful to a Premier League club than a sixteen-year-old who had been physically prepared for senior football two years early. The export figures suggest the bet has paid out repeatedly.
Genk’s Jos Vaessen Talent Academy at the club’s training centre in Genk has, by some measures, surpassed Anderlecht’s output in the past decade. Kevin De Bruyne (in residence from age fourteen), Thibaut Courtois, Christian Benteke, Divock Origi, Wilfred Ndidi, Sébastien Haller, Leandro Trossard — the alumni list is nearly absurd given the host club’s modest budget. Genk’s specific contribution to the Belgian model has been an emphasis on transition football: their academy teams are drilled, from age twelve upward, to play a game built on counter-pressing the moment of ball loss and on direct, vertical attacks the moment of ball recovery. The first-team identity, which has been remarkably consistent across managerial changes, is the same identity. The current captain, Bryan Heynen, joined the academy at six in 2003 and has not played professionally for any other club. He earned his first Belgium senior call-up in March 2025 at twenty-eight — late, by elite standards, but the kind of late that suggests the club’s confidence in him predated the national team’s.
Club Brugge’s youth setup has, in the past five years, displaced both Anderlecht and Genk in the perception of European scouting departments as the most reliable Belgian source of immediately Premier-League-ready central attackers. Charles De Ketelaere (Brugge youth, sold to Milan, now at Atalanta after the loan-and-sale that has finally turned him into a Serie A regular — three goals and five assists in 1,727 league minutes through late April 2026), Loïs Openda (Brugge academy until his loan to Vitesse, then Lens, then Leipzig, now at Juventus on loan), Antonio Nusa (signed at fifteen, sold to Leipzig at nineteen), Maxim De Cuyper, Noa Lang. The Brugge academy’s specific identity is technical wide attackers and dual-footed creators — the players who, in the modern game, are most likely to command transfer fees in the £40m–£70m range.
Royal Antwerp, the fourth element, has been the slowest to produce in volume but the most disruptive when it has produced. Their 2023 league-and-cup double under Mark van Bommel was won, in significant part, by a young squad shaped around academy graduates and shrewd Eredivisie imports. The academy’s continuing function has kept the city’s footballing infrastructure relevant to the European market in a way it had not been for a generation.
The four academies are competitive with each other domestically, which is the part the export figures undersell. A fourteen-year-old Belgian midfielder is, in any given year, being scouted by all four programmes. The competition for the strongest local talent forces each academy to maintain a coaching standard that, in less competitive small-nation environments, can drift downward when one programme establishes regional dominance. None of the four can afford to coast.
A League Built on Counter-Pressing
The tactical identity of the Belgian Pro League itself — the senior football the academies eventually feed — is more uniform than the four-academy story suggests. Belgian top-flight matches are characterised, more reliably than matches in any other European top division, by high pressing intensity, fast transitions, and a relatively high number of possession changes per ninety minutes. The reasons are partly structural: the league has, since the introduction of the championship-and-relegation playoff system in 2009, been organised to maximise competitive matches per season, which incentivises managers to play higher-variance football than they might in a longer, lower-stakes single-table format.
The result, on the visible match evidence of the 2025-26 season as it has played out, is that a young Belgian midfielder spends his formative senior seasons in a tactical environment that closely resembles the Premier League. Counter-pressing is the assumed baseline. A 4-3-3 with aggressive wide pressing, or a 3-4-2-1 with wing-backs as the press’s outermost arc, is the typical shape. Possession patterns favour vertical progression over lateral circulation. The Bundesliga and the Premier League are the two leagues that most reliably fit Belgian Pro League graduates because they are the two leagues whose tactical assumptions most closely match what those graduates have spent their senior years already doing.
The continuity of league identity through managerial changes is a striking property of the Belgian system. Genk sacked Thorsten Fink in mid-December 2025 after the team drifted fourteen points off the league lead; the interim staff retained the same vertical-and-pressing identity Fink had inherited. Club Brugge sacked Nicky Hayen on December 8, 2025, ahead of a Champions League fixture at Arsenal, replacing him with the returning Ivan Leko — a move that, on the broadcast evidence of subsequent matches, produced negligible change in the team’s pressing structure. The systems persist through their managers because the players have, by their early twenties, already internalised them at academy level.
The animation above, originally constructed to illustrate Klopp’s Dortmund, also describes the tactical pattern that the Genk academy and its Pro League peers begin teaching their players in the under-fourteen age groups. Three pressers converge within two seconds of ball loss; the carrier’s three passing options are cut in geometric sequence; the ball is recovered, by design, in the zone where an immediate vertical pass becomes available. The pattern is not unique to Belgian football — it is the dominant pressing pattern in elite European football of the last fifteen years — but the Belgian academies’ specific contribution has been the consistency with which they drill it. By the time a Genk-raised midfielder makes his Pro League debut at eighteen, he has spent six years executing the same counter-press in increasingly senior age groups. The first-team match, in tactical terms, is not new information.
The 2024-25 Season — and the End of the Brugge–Genk Duopoly
The 2024-25 season produced the most consequential domestic story Belgian football has had in a decade. Union Saint-Gilloise — the club from the Forest neighbourhood in Brussels that had spent fifty-two years in the second tier before its 2021 promotion under American owner Tony Bloom’s data-driven ownership group — won the Belgian Pro League title on May 25, 2025, with a 3-1 win over La Gantoise on the final day of the championship playoffs. It was Union’s first top-flight title since 1935. The gap to second-place Club Brugge was three points; the league had been competitive into May; the result was, by any reasonable metric, an upset of the kind that small-nation top divisions are supposed to no longer produce.
The structural lesson of Union’s title is the more interesting one. The club’s recruitment, run on the same Bloom-affiliated data-modelling principles that have driven Brighton’s player-trading model in England, has emphasised undervalued players from outside the Belgian academy system — French Ligue 2 graduates, Scandinavian-league forwards, scouting-network finds from the Balkans. The squad that won the title contained relatively few academy products from the four traditional Belgian programmes. The implication, for the small-nation talent-factory thesis, is that the league itself is now sufficiently competitive and tactically coherent to produce title-winning football out of imported talent that the four big academies did not raise. The pipeline now flows in two directions: out, in the form of academy graduates sold to elite leagues, and in, in the form of European-level talent imported on the assumption that the Belgian Pro League is a sufficiently visible shop window to produce its own onward-sale market.
The Coaching Export
The under-discussed development of the past five years is that Belgian football is increasingly producing coaches as well as players. Vincent Kompany, raised at Anderlecht, is now in his second season at Bayern Munich after the unbeaten Burnley promotion campaign of 2023-24. Roberto Martínez, the long-time Belgium senior manager, has carried the tactical vocabulary of the Belgian set-up to the Portugal job. Felice Mazzù, Karel Geraerts, and the current cohort of Belgian managers operating in the Eredivisie and Ligue 1 represent a coaching export-flow that, ten years ago, did not exist.
The structural reason is the same reason the academies produce players: the Pro League’s tactical identity, which is consistent across clubs, gives a young Belgian assistant coach an internalised system to inherit. A coach who has spent five years at Genk’s academy understands the same pressing-and-transition framework that a coach at Brugge’s academy understands. When he moves abroad to a Eredivisie or 2. Bundesliga side, the system he installs is recognisable to scouts and to players who have moved through any of the Belgian programmes. The talent-factory metaphor, in its full form, includes the coaching staff.
The 2025-26 Season’s Quieter Story
This season’s Pro League title race has been less dramatic than last season’s, with Genk’s mid-season managerial change having effectively ended their challenge. The continuing story is at the export end of the pipeline: Antonio Nusa’s progression at Leipzig, Charles De Ketelaere’s settlement at Atalanta, Malick Fofana’s emergence at Lyon as a £50m+ winger Liverpool and Arsenal have both been linked with, Romeo Lavia’s recovery from his injury-disrupted first Chelsea seasons. The Pro League viewed as a developmental institution is producing at full capacity.
That the country’s domestic football coverage, in a low-stakes title-race year, has remained focused on the export-end statistics — on Doku’s Premier League goals, on Onana’s Aston Villa form, on Openda’s struggles to settle at Juventus — is itself the marker of what the Belgian football culture has become. The senior matches on a Saturday afternoon are, in part, a live audition for the next set of Premier League buyers. Every club involved knows it. Every academy operates within the assumption. The economic model of the four big academies depends on the export market continuing to clear at the volumes it has been clearing at for fifteen years.
The remarkable feature of the past five years is that the volumes have not declined. The Golden Generation has retired or aged out. The next cohort is producing comparable per-window export totals at comparable price points. The pipeline, viewed from outside, looks like a country with eleven million people that has solved a particular development problem most countries with more resources have not solved.
The structural answer — four serious competitive academies, a uniformly tactical league identity, an export-economy assumption built into the developmental model — is less romantic than the Golden Generation framing was. It is also, on the visible 2025-26 evidence, more durable. Generations end. Institutions outlast their generations. That, in the dry sense the word can carry in football writing, is what Belgium has built. An institution. The De Bruynes and the Hazards were the most visible products of it. They were not the cause of it. The cause is still operating.