Is this why the Newcastle United owners are in talks to buy KV Oostende? | OneFootball

Living in Belgium, I took particular interest in the news that the Newcastle United owners are in talks to buy KV Oostende.

On the 2nd of April we were driving to my wife’s family and we commented to each other that the streets and the roads were completely deserted.

Personally, I have better things to do than head into Brugge for 10 am on a Sunday morning and stand cheek by jowl with 28,000 other people to watch the start of a cycling race. Or more likely look at the backs of the heads of some six foot plus blokes.

The crowds then all head off as quickly as they can to friends, family, neighbours, or corporate hospitality and spend the rest of the day watching the race on TV. Those lining other parts of the route do the same. That’s why the streets were deserted.

Cycling in its many forms is the biggest spectator and participant sport in Belgium.

Just to put that into perspective, those with long memories who can think back to our last competitive venture into Belgium against Club Brugge, might be surprised that this is currently Belgium’s biggest club football stadium with a total capacity of 29,000.

Standard Liege comes in second with a capacity of 27, 600.

There were more people standing on the Markt in Brugge at 10 am on a cold and unpleasant April morning than can fit into Standard Liege’s stadium and more people than the average attendance at Belgium’s best supported football club: Club Brugge whose average attendance this season has been somewhere between 20,000 and 23,000 depending where you take your stats from. Strangely, given these figures, Club Brugge are planning to build a new 40,000 capacity stadium…

Jupiler Pro League table toppers RSC Genk boast an average attendance of 16,800 and Tony Bloom’s other football club Union Saint Gilloise, who are hot on their heels with five games remaining, have a paltry average of 6,200 backsides on seats. Union are based in Brussels, so it’s not as if we are talking about a provincial club. Ok, they have in more recent times been the poor relation of Anderlecht but they themselves only pull in an average of between 18,000 and 19,000 paying punters.

When Club Brugge played against Atletico Madrid, their highest gate of the season, they still only got 27,000. In fact, the last time they were at almost capacity was the last match before the lockdown in the local derby against Cercle Brugge.

For those unfamiliar with Cercle… they ground share with Club and their average attendance is 4,300. I have attended one football match in Belgium that didn’t involve Newcastle and it was a Cercle match. To cut a very long story short… involving the consumption of lots of beer, at that match the attendance was about 3,500 with less than 100 opposition supporters present. And while a great time was had, it didn’t merit a repeat.

Despite the success of the Belgian National team, and Belgian footballers playing in all of the top leagues, football is not big in Belgium.

When my colleagues heard about the proposed take over of KV Oostende by the NUFC owners, there were all the predictable comments “must have heard about the sand dunes…” My thoughts were however, why KVO?

Their average attendance this season is even lower than that of Cercle with an average gate of 3,700. Their highest attendance was 5,800 punters for the match against Club Brugge. Just to put that in context: that’s like not being bothered to drive from Newcastle to South Shields to see Club Brugge yet seemingly their fans couldn’t be bothered to go! And at least one of the people in attendance was Kyle from the excellent Padded Seat You Tube channel. So, if you want to know what KVO’s Diaz Arena looks like click here.

Aside from the empty seats you can also see it’s a nice modern small arena (8,432 capacity) with a big emphasis on corporate hospitality.

From what little I know about the KVO youth set up, it feeds off the scraps that Club Brugge and other ‘big’ Belgian clubs youth teams pick up, and kids chucked out in their early teens and offering a live in academy experience. However, looking more closely, they seem to be doing something more than that. They have a two-tier system: ‘elite’ level teams and provincial (county) teams so that it caters for kids who may be slow developers. However, they are yet to produce any big name players, and most of their own squad don’t come from their own youth ranks.

In 2013 KVO was bought by Belgian billionaire Marc Coucke who failed to turn KVO into a major force in Belgian football. Despite his best efforts the good folk of Oostende were not that interested in becoming new KVO supporters. In 2018 he took a controlling stake in Anderlecht and was forced by the Belgian FA to sell KVO. Since getting dumped by Coucke, times have been tough for KVO with the Newcastle united owners potentially become the third owners since then.

Relegation is now a certainty for KVO. Life in the Challenger Pro League will be interesting, where half of the clubs are U23 teams of the ‘bigger’ clubs.

The U23 teams can’t be promoted by the play-off system. Though if they are one of the top six teams, after 22 matches, they will take part in the 10 game play-off league for promotion back to the Jupiler Pro League. The bottom six play for relegation.

This year two U23 teams are in the top six, so you would have a 75% chance of getting promoted if you finish in the top 6!

The two U23 teams are from Club Brugge and Anderlecht and you would expect them to finish in the play-off places most seasons, so that 75% promotion chance for a top six placing could remain for a while.

The standard of football in the Jupiler Pro League is probably comparable with the Championship in the UK but with a few clubs being a cut above the rest quality wise. So I have to ask myself, what exactly the advantage is of buying a newly relegated club to offer League One level football to NUFC loanees.

The KVO Youth Set up may well be doing the right things but from first glance, the facilities at their training area seem to be temporary structures rather than permanent. An investment opportunity certainly…

For anyone thinking the Newcastle United owners might be able to grow the supporter base, Marc Coucke couldn’t manage it and he threw a lot of money at KVO.

Oostende and surrounding areas has a population of 157,000, whereas Brugge has a population of 120,000.

However, it’s worth noting that in Belgium, football clubs fall broadly into a few types.

Local clubs like KVO, Cercle Brugge and KV Kortrijk where the fanbase comes largely from the town where they are based.

Regional Clubs such as Club Brugge, KAA Gent and Royal Antwerp where they draw their support from a much larger geographical area (West Flanders, East Flanders and Antwerp respectively) and clubs like RSC Anderlecht who have an almost national appeal.

So I return to my question, why KVO?

In the long term it may be possible to reposition KVO so that they become a regional based club; but football allegiances are not things that people switch easily. The newish owner of Cercle Brugge, the same Russian oligarch that owns AS Monaco, hasn’t been able to hugely build their fan base at the expense of Club Brugge and have had limited on field success.

Tony Bloom has restored Union Saint Gilloise to it’s former glory and is using the club to blood new players who might not otherwise get UK work permits, or struggle for game time at Brighton.

On that level, USG works well for Bloom. I am not that sure about their youth set up but their neighbours Anderlecht have a legendary youth set up, so I would imagine that USG will be feeding on their scraps. USG’s support comes largely from the district of Brussels where they are based in the district of Forest. No that’s not a joke!

The fanbase is unlikely to grow quickly with Anderlecht quite literally on their doorstep. So there it’s quite obvious that the goal is player development for Brighton with the bonus being that USG supporters have a club that can compete again as part of the Belgian Elite.

Two of the clubs most likely to be promoted to the Jupiler Pro league are RWDM (owned by Crystal Palace majority shareholder John Textor) and SK Beveren (owned by Crystal Palace minority shareholder David Blitzer), while that may seem a bit weird or even contradictory, both have interests in football clubs in the US and elsewhere, plus a wide portfolio of sporting investments.

While RWDM being an amalgamation of various phoenix clubs have a Brussels-wide following with some potential for growth, SK Beveren are most likely to remain in the shadow of Royal Anderlecht. So the question again is why? What is the advantage? I can only assume that both clubs will act as stepping stones from the US soccer world to European football and ultimately the EPL.

A few of the current Brighton players have come through USG, but as RWDM and SK Beveren are part of a larger sporting portfolio, maybe the idea is purely revenue generation for Textor and Blitzer and not at all linked to player development for Palace.

So again I come back to the question, why KVO for the Newcastle United owners?

I can only imagine that a longer game is at play. My guess would be a further extension of the youth system and hoping to bring in raw prospects from Eastern Europe or outside of the EU, develop them and sell them on elsewhere in Europe or the UK or sell them to Newcastle. Similarly, players bought by Newcastle could be sent out on loan to KVO once they have returned to the Jupiler Pro League.

Before that point, it could be interesting to send youth players or even players from our U21 squad to play in the Challenger Pro League, rather than in League 1 in the UK.

It might also help Shola refocus his ideas from the current loan leagues and look at placing players with teams outside of the UK.

Finally, it could be that the Newcastle United owners look to take some of the corporate hospitality lessons learned from KVO and implement some of them. Increasing match day revenue by expanding corporate experiences is certainly something they will be looking at.