Without new owners, KV Oostende look set to become the latest of Belgium’s ‘lost’ clubs | OneFootball

After another six point deduction was announced during the week leading up to Christmas eve, KV Oostende found themselves even deeper in the mire. Now, talks of bankruptcy and the eventually folding of the club seem closer than ever. It is a said state of affairs, and a reminder that while football is awash with money at the higher reaches of the European game, some clubs are struggling to even survive lower down the pyramids.

Yet for Oostende and Belgian football, this eventuality is not one that comes out of nowhere. Despite a strong season just a handful of campaigns ago, which saw the club knocking on the door of European football, the club has fallen from grace. Owners have been blamed for their lack of financial savvy, or even just plain common sense. When we consider that the Pacific Media Group has seen almost all of the clubs within its portfolio succumb to relegation, was the eventual demotion of Oostende to the Challenger Pro League really a shock?

Yet the list of Belgian clubs who have become ‘lost’ is a pretty long list. In recent years Royal Excel Mouscron were deal with in a similar fashion. Poor financial leadership saw them slip out of the Pro League and into the Challenger Pro League. After just one season in the second tier the club was folded.

In 2020 another club was ‘lost’. Koninklijke Sporting Club Lokeren Oost-Vlaanderen, or KSC Lokeren for short, went bankrupt and had to almost dissolve. They were then reborn as KSC Lokeren-Temse, a merger between the bankrupts club and KSV Temse and started back in the Belgian fourth tier. They have since returned to the third tier and are currently mounting a strong promotion charge to get back into the second tier.

Oostende fans will hope that a last minute takeover can save their club. If not, they will be looking at the likes of Lokeren to see if there is a potential merger opportunity out there to keep some semblance of the club alive. The club currently known as KV Oostende was itself born out of a merger in 1981 between two sides from Oostende. Over forty years later, that club looks like it has run out of time.

GBeNeFN | Ben Jackson