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Object #32 - '81-'82 Anderlecht Team Photo

20th century

City Life

In Brussels, the defining debate that splits the city, setting neighbour against neighbour isn’t about beer. It’s about football. Do you wear the red-white-black of Molenbeek, Royale Union St Gilloise’s yellow-and-blue, or the mauve of Anderlecht. Union - who don’t play in St Gilles but in next-door Vorst - were all-conquering before WWII, racking up 11 league titles. In the late-1930s, they had a young local playing up front, a brewer’s son who later moved across town to play for the Paars-wit of Anderlecht before his career was truncated by injury and wartime family tragedy.

Constant Vanden Stock never forgot his footballing origins, even when he was forced to leave the game to run Brasserie Belle-Vue following his father’s death. “Anyone who looks closely enough at my forehead,” Vanden Stock said, talking to writer Hugo Camps, “can still see the imprint of the laces.” After exchanging his boots for a brewer’s smock, he maintained his links with his first love throughout the 1960s. While guiding Belle-Vue to its dominant position as Brussels’ largest Lambic brewery, Vanden Stock continued coaching and was appointed the selector for the Belgian men’s national team. In his absence Anderlecht, like Belle-Vue, prospered in the 1960s, winning a record five straight titles. But by decade’s end, financial issues forced the club to approach their former player for investment. In 1969 Vanden Stock joined Anderlecht’s board, bringing 450,000 francs with him and within two years he assumed total control. 

Involvement in sport was not unusual for Brussels’ breweries. In the same period, Wielemans-Ceuppens sponsored the Groene Leeuw cycling team. But Vanden Stock’s investment in Anderlecht was different, and his tenure mirrored his work at Belle-Vue: domestic consolidation followed by adventures in Europe. He excised the dead wood from the playing squad, and reorganised the club’s parlous finances and woeful infrastructure. 

A league and cup double followed in 1972. In 1973, the circular Belle-Vue logo arrived on Anderlecht’s purple-and-white jerseys, where it would stay as team sponsor for the rest of the decade. Vanden Stock’s “most beautiful [football] memory” came in 1976 when Anderlecht beat West Ham 4-2 to lift the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup in Brussels. A second Cup Winners' Cup followed in 1978, another league title in 1981, as Anderlecht and Belle-Vue conquered all-comers. 

The team lining up for the next season’s group photo had been shaped by Vanden Stock into a formidable force. There was Juan Lozano, the Spanish midfielder seated fifth from the right who Vanden Stock called an “unsurpassed artist”. Standing at the back, sporting a bouffant mullet, was Ludo Coeck, a winger pairing “class and intelligence with a rare elegance.” Anderlecht didn’t win anything that season, but a year later they hoisted another European trophy. Belle-Vue’s shirt sponsorship had by this time been replaced by the Generale Bank. But when Anderlecht’s players lined out to play a friendly match against Diego Maradona’s F.C. Barcelona in August 1983 they did so under the floodlights of the remodelled, and newly-baptised Constant Vanden Stock stadium.