How Royale Union Saint-Gilloise perfected the role of ‘a selling club’ – and may win a title with it

Last weekend, Belgium’s Pro League split and its six-team championship series began.

Among those clubs are Royale Union Saint-Gilloise (RUSG) who, since being promoted back to Belgium’s top-flight in 2021, have defied budgetary disadvantages, as well as player and coaching turnover, to consistently challenge at the top of the table.

RUSG are from Brussels and are 11-time national champions. That’s faded glory, though. The last of those titles was won in 1935 and until promotion four years ago, they had not played in Belgium’s top flight since 1973.

But they began the new phase of the season with a show of power, thumping Royal Antwerp — who were playing in the Champions League last season — 5-1 at the 9,400-capacity Joseph Marien Stadium on Saturday.

Their story is becoming well known. So much so that RUSG are now a shorthand for quality, data-led recruitment and confounding over-performance. In that first 2021-22 season back in the Pro League, they began the year with the joint-lowest wage spend in the division and as a 500-1 outsider.

They did not become Belgian champions that year, but they did finish the 30-game regular season in first place (the champions are decided by the six-team play-off series). It was remarkable but no anomaly.

They finished second the next year and first again the year after, both times despite the eighth-highest wage spend. They also reached the quarter-final of the Europa League and the last 16 of the Conference League in successive years and, in 2024, won the Belgian Cup and Belgian Super Cup.

The results have been startling and that over-performance is described by the many players who have been part of it — who typically arrived unknown and undervalued, and departed for big sums that kept the virtuous cycle spinning forward.

Deniz Undav, who joined on a free transfer from the German third division, was sold to Brighton for €7million (£5.8m; $7.6m) and is today a German international playing for Stuttgart. Dante Vanzeir was playing for Genk’s C team in 2020 when he was signed for €300,000, but left three years later for the New York Red Bulls for €5m. Or there’s Cameron Puertas, signed for €1.5m (Lausanne-Sport, 2022), sold for €15m (Al Qadsiah, 2024).

On and on. Players leave, but without leaving gaps behind. When Victor Boniface was sold to Bayer Leverkusen €20m in 2023, he was replaced by Mohamed Amoura, who left for Wolfsburg a year later (an initial loan that will be made permanent for €17.5m).

This season, more stars are rising. Against Antwerp, Franjo Ivanovic scored twice — he cost €4m last summer from Rijeka and has just won his first caps for Croatia. Giant Canadian forward Promise David (6ft 5in/196cm) got his 11th goal of the season, too, and recently represented his country for the first time, having moved to Belgium from the Estonian Premier Division last summer for €400,000.

In midfield, Noah Sadiki (€1.4m from Anderlecht, 2023) is likely to command an eight-figure transfer fee when he leaves RUSG. Ousseynou Niang, a thrusting, 23-year-old winger from Senegal, should be worth much more than the €1.5m that brought him to Brussels from Latvian club Riga.

But quality talent identification is not solely what allows RUSG to be successful. There is also stability despite the flux — being able to counterbalance the volatile nature of selling-club life.

Alex Muzio is RUSG’s president and owner. In 2018, he and Brighton & Hove Albion owner Tony Bloom bought the club together. Bloom set up StarLizard, the gambling consultancy firm through which Muzio had risen.

For the first five years, Muzio held a 10 per cent stake and controlled the board voting rights. In July 2023, to comply with UEFA Competition Regulations around multi-club ownership, he remortgaged his house to acquire 75 per cent of the club and reduce Bloom’s holding to a minority stake. RUSG became very much Muzio’s club.

“We’ve tried to generally keep it relatively simple,” Muzio tells The Athletic. “We don’t just sign loads of young players from around world, all of whom speak different languages, and then just chuck them together and hope that it will work out.

“In our squad, we try to mix the personalities. We also try to mix the people who are expecting to start with those who don’t and mix leaders with non-leaders. Because if you sign 20 players and they all expect to start, that’s not going to work. It just leads to having very unhappy people all the time and a manager who feels he has to rotate constantly just to keep the squad together.

“At the same time, of course you don’t want to have only 11 starters and then 11 backups, either, because then you have two groups: stars here, back-ups over there.

“I don’t know if you ever played Football Manager, but the way that they started to do their squad dynamics was really smart. You have a few indispensable players, then a couple that are very likely to start, a few that that are quite likely to, then some who feel they can make an impact from the bench and so on.

“It can’t be too binary; there has to be a blend. We try to find the most talented players we can, but with those constraints in place.”

Muzio with RUSG head coach Sebastien Pocognoli last month (Virginie Lefour/Belga/AFP/Getty Images)

Selling matters, too. RUSG’s role in the sport — existing in the gap between feeder leagues and the elite divisions — is lucrative but crowded. Identifying the right players is one challenge. Convincing them that the club is right for them — that opportunity exists to improve, that the club will not stand in the way of future opportunities — is another.

The ideal selling point for a player is, Muzio says, “the million-dollar question”.

“It’s so hard, but generally it’s about interest. The reality is that if you play for us and you’re earning X, then when it comes to the right time to sell for us, it’s when the player is offered three and a half times X or more.

“We’re not here to block players. If you become a club that’s blocking players, then players stop wanting to come. It’s also bad for the spirit in the dressing room. But it’s just a moral thing. Players’ careers are very short. And if you block a guy from leaving when he’s been offered four times a salary and then he breaks his leg, then that’s life-changing and you just don’t want that on your conscience. I don’t want it anyway.”

But there’s a compromise to be found between making sure that the player is treated fairly — allowing the RUSG’s reputation for advancing careers to be signposted — and ensuring that the team is not disadvantaged.

“It can’t be that the player is going to earn X from the move, but that the club is only going to earn one-fifth of X from the transfer fee.

“That’s not fair either, because we’ve obviously taken risks and we invest in all of the players that come here — with coaching, with physios, with operations, with facilities — and we would have a significant operational loss on an annual basis without transfers and without Europe competition.”

Having control over the terms of how a player leaves the club is one of the reasons why Muzio dislikes release clauses. Many clubs in USG’s position employ them. Some believe they create more certainty over a player’s value and, theoretically, help with future budgeting.

Muzio does not agree. In fact, only once since he became president has he allowed a player to have one in his contract — and that was for Undav, who had been unwilling to join (what was then) a second division club without one.

“They cap the ceiling of what we can achieve. When we signed (Maltese midfielder) Teddy Teuma from Red Star (in 2019), if his representatives had said that they wanted a release clause of €3m, that would have been 10 times what we were paying (€300,000). But we ended up selling him for over €5m (to Reims).

“When we signed Dante Vanzeir for €300,000, if we’d put in a release clause of three million, which again is more than 10 times, we would have lost out significantly there, given that we sold him for quite a bit more.”

Vanzeir at RUSG in 2022, before joining MLS (Laurie Dieffemacq/Belga Mag/AFP/Getty Images)

Logistically, they are also a challenge. Particularly for a club that wants agency over when players are sold and under what conditions.

“If we’re ever going to do one again, we will make sure that it’s only applicable early in the window. It really isn’t good for a squad to have some guy who’s got a release clause hanging around, with the chance that someone might trigger it, but you’re not sure when. Then, on the last day of the window, with two hours to go, they trigger it and you’re left with a big hole.”

If the way players come in and out of the club is decisive, then so too is how coaches arrive and depart. This is RUSG’s fourth season in the Pro League and Sebastien Pocognoli, who is currently in charge, is the club’s fourth manager in four years.

They won promotion under Felice Mazzu, who left in 2022. Karel Geraerts was appointed to succeed him, before Alexander Blessin replaced him a year later. Blessin left for the Bundesliga’s St Pauli in the summer of 2024, replacing Fabian Hurzeler, who had joined Brighton.

Superficially, the lack of continuity seems like a red flag. However, all three coaches averaged more than two points per league game and the progress of players signed showed no signs of slowing. That kind of succession is its own science.

Coaching recruitment is less popularised but, Muzio says, as with players, the key is to properly contextualise performance and isolate effect. “The market assesses the quality of coaches by looking at their rough budget and where their team finished. And if you’ve got someone that’s kept over-performing their budget, then that’s good.

“And that’s a very logical way of doing things. Fortunately, we have access to the Jamestown Analytics’ data (Bloom’s recruitment-focused offshoot), which means that we can look deeper than just the budget and see whether the club spent well or poorly.

“We can see how well all the players were performing before the coach arrived and then after. Then, we can see whether the team has got better — and if so, why? Were they lucky? Was it something else?”

How a coach suits the environment is equally important. Coaches who work under Muzio, CEO Philippe Bormans and sporting director Chris O’Loughlin, have to accept they will only be part of the conversation about incoming players, rather than the leading voice within it.

“They need to fit in with our staff and with our structure, too,” Muzio says. “New coaches need to realise that they’re coming into a club that’s already fully formed. A lot of candidates that we’ve interviewed before have had four or five people that they expect to bring with them, from job to job.

Pocognoli celebrates after beating RSC Anderlecht in February (John Thys/Belga Mag/AFP/Getty Images)

“The reality is — and this is not a criticism of them — but if they come in and bring four people with them, then that becomes the club. The other people — the existing staff — are just looking in, then. They’re asking what the style is and what the methodology is. If we were to do that, the good staff that we have now would look around and think that they’re not really having an influence.

“Then, as soon as that head coach gets an offer and leaves, he takes all his people with him and you’ve already lost all the people that were good before. You’re just going to have your soul ripped out all the time. When Alexander Blessin came, for example, he didn’t bring anyone. He came on his own. He had all the same physios, all the same analysts, and all the same coaches that Sebastien (Pocognoli) has now.”

When a coach leaves, he does not take everything he has achieved — momentum included — with him. The evidence is in the team’s performance this season and how another batch of RUSG players seem on their way to lucrative moves, further up the food chain.

But, says Muzio, that’s for the summer.

“Our aim is not just to buy players and churn them out for transfer fees, then take money out of the club. That is not the goal. Our goal is to be good.”

RUSG are exactly that. They might also be nine games away from their first title in 90 years.

(Top photo: RUSG celebrate beating Braga in the Europa League in January; Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP via Getty Images)