Offside - Football in the city of Ghent

On 8 November, Football Makes History was invited to a special preview of the new exhibition ‘Offside – Football in the City’ at the Ghent City Museum STAM, ahead of its official opening on 28 November. The visit included an engaging conversation with the museum curators and local football partners involved in the exhibition. This article shares what we heard and how excited we are about this exhibition that managed very well to connect football, as a cultural phenomenon, to the social fabric and urban history of Ghent. It includes the voices of Wim Beelaert of KAA Gent Foundation and Brecht Dewilde of STAM – City Museum Ghent.

It’s been a long time coming

In 2013, when KAA Gent left the Jules Otten Stadium after 93 years and moved to a new ground, the STAM and the KAA Gent Foundation joined forces to develop a heritage project around this relocation: the stadium and its neighbourhood were mapped, and objects and stories were collected and documented.

In 2018 KAA Gent entrusted the Foundation with the mission to build and preserve the club’s archive and collection. In the same year, the first talks took place about the possibility of organizing an exhibition at the STAM Museum in 2025.

In 2020, the cooperation agreement between the City of Ghent, KAA Gent, and the KAA Gent Foundation stated that the possibilities would be explored to create a heritage project with an exhibition on the occasion of 125 years of KAA Gent (in 2025) and 125 years of Racing Gent (in 2024).

For the KAA Gent Foundation, the starting point was the celebration of 125 years of KAA Gent and KRC Gent. For the STAM Museum, however, this was not an obvious focus. As a nationally recognised institution, STAM works with themes that tell a broader story about the city and the concept of urbanity. The perspective therefore, quickly shifted toward the interaction between football and the city, using Ghent’s extensive football network as an opportunity to explore the city’s social-sporting fabric.

Illuminating research and converging anniversaries

A dedicated two-year research trajectory of the collaboration revealed that Ghent in 2025 celebrates not only 125 years of KAA Gent, but also 150 years of football in the city—dating back to the founding of the first club in 1875—and 100 years of women’s football. Together, these three anniversaries form the lens through which the full historical breadth and social depth of the sport in the city are explored.

The research exceeded all expectations regarding the scale and impact of football in Ghent. Since 1875, more than 1,400 football initiatives have existed in the city, spanning field football, five-a-side football, and futsal. Taken together, these clubs constitute a dense social-sporting fabric and, effectively, the shared history of well over one million residents across generations.

Thus, the exhibition not only tells the story of KAA Gent, but also that of the city’s local football clubs; the link between football and migration; the remarkable history of women’s football, which persisted despite an official ban by the Belgian FA between 1923 and 1971; supporters’ culture; and the often complex relationship between football and society. Spatial analysis of all 1,400 clubs and their pitches further reveals football’s significant imprint on Ghent’s urban landscape. Football becomes a valuable lens onto urban history, illustrating connections with industrialisation, neighbourhood development, and the politics of spatial planning.

Learning from good practices

There are several exhibitions and initiatives that served as inspiration, including:

Museum of London: Harry Kane: The making of England’s number nine
Designmuseum Londen: Football: Designing the Beautiful Game – Design Museum
Amsterdam Museum: The making of Voetbal Halleluja! — Hart Amsterdammuseum
Kunsthal Rotterdam: “Ieder z’n voetbal” – Kunsthal
Imagine IC: ‘Panna’s en Akkas’
Eintracht Frankfurt Museum: Frankfurter Sporthistorie – Eintracht Frankfurt Historie & Museum
Parijs, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine: Il était une fois les stades
Koers, Roeselare – https://koersmuseum.be/en

The network of Football Makes History, and several network events also helped to link up this world of football and heritage.

More than trophies

Register, record, recollect

The exhibition brings together a rich historical context, with telling objects and striking stories. The project as a whole has smartly combined the work. From the outset of the project, it was clear that the exhibition was only one of three main objectives. The first, short-term goal was to safeguard and register the objects collected so far by the KAA Gent Foundation. In recent years, following the move from the Ottenstadium to the new arena and thanks to the personal commitment of the Foundation’s coordinator, a substantial collection had emerged, covering all aspects of football in Ghent, with a particular focus on the KAA Gent club.

However, the project aimed not only to document KAA Gent’s heritage. A key component was also the systematic identification and registration of surviving football heritage from all local clubs. What remains of the 1,400 clubs we were able to identify? This prompted a citywide search for shirts, photographs, trophies, balls, pins, pennants, and other artefacts dispersed across hundreds of (mostly) private collections. This was the first attempt to comprehensively locate and document this material across the entire city—both to gather items for the exhibition and, crucially, to ensure their long-term preservation.

Heritage work by volunteers for long-term safeguarding

The collaboration between the partners aimed to establish heritage-standard registration of this material. To achieve this, the city’s heritage hub (“erfgoedcel”, part of STAM) acted as a service provider and facilitator for the Foundation’s volunteers, offering training, guidance, materials, and ongoing support. This is part of the erfgoedcel’s broader mission: it provides similar support to other organisations and collection holders in Ghent, helping them to preserve and document local heritage according to professional standards. For the project itself, a dedicated registration space was set up in one of the museum’s wings.

While the exhibition itself serves as the second objective, the partners consider a third, long-term goal even more important: strengthening and safeguarding the Foundation’s role in heritage work. In pursuing this, the partners draw inspiration from projects within the heritage sector as well as international football heritage initiatives, such as Football Makes Heritage and Football Memories.

Heritage belongs with Football Fans and Club Social Responsibility

The supporters of KAA Gent are represented in the KAA Gent Foundation as an important stakeholder. The KAA Gent Foundation also has a broad network of contacts within the Ghent supporter community, united in various organisations. Through the KAA Gent Supporters’ Council, the club also has an official advisory body.

This heritage initiative was already announced in 2020. For quite some time, a dialogue was held with the supporters about building the collection, gathering stories, and the initiatives surrounding 125 years of KAA Gent. This led to strong engagement and a great willingness to collaborate.

The KAA Gent Foundation also organises three football networks in Ghent: grassroots youth football, community football, and walking football. Within these networks, nearly all football actors in Ghent are active. These three networks were also mobilised as part of this exhibition through volunteering.

Power of the People

A clever process of ‘participatory heritage work’ was enacted with KAA Gent Foundation volunteers working through the collection of the club, registering and digitising its collection for the first time in history in a professional way.

In the work of the heritage cell, broadening heritage engagement across many sectors and empowering those involved is always a guiding principle. This can be achieved through collection work as well as through a wider social use of heritage and history. It touches on the very essence of heritage work: strengthening people in this process and helping them find the right path forward. Hence, people create, foster, and nurture living networks and ‘communities’.

In the context of the broader search for local football heritage, the exhibition was conceived as a call to all clubs, fans, and football lovers to cherish, preserve, and pass on this shared legacy. Football is more than a game—it is an essential part of the city’s history. The exhibition seeks to raise awareness of football heritage and to encourage its better appreciation, preservation, and accessibility. While a considerable amount of football heritage has survived, much more has sadly been lost. Of the nearly 1,400 clubs we know of, only a small fraction have left behind tangible material. Shirts from local clubs dating from before the 1980s, for example, have entirely disappeared.

Football emotions in the museum

The spatial concept of the exhibition is designed with a specific fit to football; with a centre court, a promenade addressing different themes and ‘the stands’ for more participatory approaches.

‘Offside’ was designed to be the most emotional exhibition of the 2025–2026 cultural season. People love to say that ‘football is emotion’, and they’re absolutely right. It’s a whirlwind: many feelings at once, crashing together at high speed.

To capture that, we leaned fully into experience: an immersive emotional trip. It starts the moment you enter the first (and biggest) space of the exhibition, the former abbey church of the monastery that now houses STAM. We’re transforming it into a stadium. Visitors step in the way professional players walk out onto the pitch. You step onto sacred ground: a stadium imagined as an open-air theatre, wrapped in the roar of the crowd.

That stadium feeling continues throughout the exhibition. The cloister’s corridor becomes the promenade – the ring that winds under the stands. The rooms in the monastery wings become the stands themselves, complete with box areas.

This setup lets us shape the narrative in two routes – or, if you like, in two halves of a match. The promenade tells the story of 150 years of local football. In the box areas, you step into the world of professional football, with KAA Gent, Racing Gent and Ghent Fémina Club as main protagonists.

Storytelling beyond 90 minutes

The stadium experience described above is key. It runs not only through the layout and structure of the exhibition, but also through its scenography and graphic design. The entire expo breathes football in all its forms.

In terms of storytelling, the human angle is essential—the stories of so many people. Relatable, emotional, sometimes funny. To capture that, we worked heavily with film. We created video portraits of, among others, the oldest living KAA Gent player, a deaf footballer, a superfan–super-collector with his own KAA Gent mini-museum, Laurette De Clercq of supporterscafé Wembley, a woman who ran a supporters’ café for 30 years, and the former nine-year-old player escort at KAA Gent’s very first Champions League game. These stories captivate, move, and make the whole narrative tangible and incredibly human.

That human touch is also present in the objects we’ve chosen. Take the seemingly simple, almost mundane thank-you trophy of Roland Thoorens. We found it in a second-hand shop, unaware of the remarkable story behind it. We later discovered that Roland had lost a leg in a tram accident at a young age and never played football himself. Yet at Legia Gent he became indispensable off the pitch. As club secretary, he was its backbone for more than fifty years (1966–2020). When he moved to a care home at age 86, the trophy ended up in the shop. A STAM colleague recognized it as a silent witness to decades of devotion.

The role of the superstar

As the exhibition’s showpiece—and a key element in our communications—we recreated Kevin De Bruyne’s childhood bedroom, in collaboration with his parents and with Kevin himself. It tells the universal story of a child dreaming of becoming a top player, with Kevin reflecting on that dream and on his youth. The story fits perfectly: Kevin bridges the local level (he scored his very first goals at the neighbourhood club VV Drongen before moving to KAA Gent’s youth academy) and the global top tier. In this way, his journey ties the exhibition’s two routes together.

A forgotten pioneer: Sidonie veschueren

The exhibition pays tribute to a forgotten pioneer of women’s football in Ghent: Sidonie Verschueren. Her sporting legacy is celebrated with a brand-new statue designed by Pascale Pollier.

Sidonie was born on 30 July 1906 in Antwerp and became the star of Ghent Fémina Club. Established in 1925, Ghent Fémina was the city’s first women’s football club and won the national title in only its second season. At the time, women’s football faced strong resistance: the Belgian Football Association banned it, deeming it ‘indecent’ and even harmful to fertility. Women were not allowed to play in men’s football stadiums, limiting their opportunities for income and growth. Despite these obstacles, they organized their own competitions and even formed a national team, the forerunner of today’s Red Flames. It was not until 1971 that the Belgian FA officially recognized women’s football.

Amid these challenges, Sidonie stood out as a forward, not only for her club but also for the Belgian national team. Yet her talents were not limited to football. Between 1923 and 1932, she claimed 14 Belgian titles in shot put, hurdling, and sprinting, and competed at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam in the 100 metres and high jump.

Very little is known about the rest of her life, and even the date of her death remains unknown. With this statue, Sidonie finally receives the recognition she deserves as a trailblazing woman in the sporting history of Ghent and Belgium.

Hugo Fenichel & Freddy Chavez: Football during WW II

Coach Hugo Fenichel, a Jewish Hungarian, made his mark in Ghent during the 1930s. He led Racing Gent to the first division (1931) and ARA La Gantoise to promotion in 1936. Under his guidance, the young Freddy Chaves made his debut in the first team.

When WW II started, after a short pause, the football league in Ghent resumed under German pressure. Clubs like La Gantoise, Racing Gent, and VV Drongen played against German military teams, often out of fear of reprisals. In 1941 Hugo Fenichel was arrested, deported to Neuengamme, and on 15 June 1942 murdered in Bernburg.

In October 1942, Chaves was selected for the Flemish national team in Wuppertal. Participation was mandatory to avoid being sent to a labor camp. He refused to give the Nazi salute, was robbed of his match fee on the return journey, and received a three-month suspension after the war. Shortly thereafter, he debuted for the Belgian national team, the Red Devils.

The history of Ghent footballers during WWII reveals a painful irony: Chaves, nurtured by Fenichel, was forced to play under pressure while his coach was murdered by the same regime. This story of talent, coercion, and loss marks a dark chapter in Ghent’s football history.

Turkish and Moroccan grassroots initiatives bring new energy

Playing football in densely populated neighborhoods without much open space? You simply play on the streets. In the 1980s, children would gather there to kick the ball around – using coats as goalposts! For these youngsters, mostly of Turkish and Moroccan descent, the barriers to joining an official team were often too high.

From the 1990s onward, football-playing youth increasingly claimed their space. They realized that football offered not only fun but also structure, safety, and opportunities. Driven by this momentum, the City of Ghent got involved. Street work and the Youth and Sports Service focused on accessible, neighborhood-oriented sports initiatives. Physical space was also created for football, with investments in converted warehouses (“sports sheds”) and later in fully equipped neighborhood sports halls.

These pioneering initiatives laid the foundation for a strong social-sport network. They challenge existing football teams to adopt a more socially conscious approach and provide young people with a stepping stone to join a regular football team or the inspiration to start their own.

Football and urban social change

Hou ende Trou Zwijnaarde was founded in 1923 within Catholic community life. It was a real village club, with its first pitch in the village centre, a stone’s throw from Zwijnaarde’s St Nicholas church. Thanks to the local connections of its chairmen, the club was able to play on the same spot for 80 years. But in 2003, HT Zwijnaarde had to make way for a park and residential care home. The club moved to the Henri Storyplein, across the Ringvaart canal. Suddenly, it found itself in New Ghent, a neighbourhood with a very different social make-up as one of the poorest and most diverse city districts.
The name HT Zwijnaarde remained, but the club reinvented itself. HT transformed into a socially engaged and intercultural community club, the largest association in the neighbourhood.

The origins of G-sports

Silent Sporting Club Gent is one of the oldest Belgian football clubs for deaf and hard-of-hearing players. It was founded in 1921 by Edmond De Latte within the framework of the Deaf Association. The pitch was located on Nekkersputstraat. Despite financial constraints, the club built a strong reputation, both in Ghent and beyond.

In 1928, Silent Sporting was renamed FC Surdac Gent – “surdus” is Latin for “deaf.” The team dominated the deaf football league and had already won 25 championship titles by the late 1960s. It also performed at a high level internationally, participating in tournaments for both deaf and hearing clubs.

In the early 2000s, Surdac transitioned to futsal. Today, it works closely with Dovensport Vlaanderen and the Belgian Deaf Sport Committee to promote sports for deaf and hard-of-hearing people.

The importance of deliberation

The exhibition has a VAR room; but not as a place of right or wrong, but as a moment to deliberate and reflect. Here we don’t shy away from social issues. The VAR (Video Assistant Referee) checks whether the game is played according to the rules. In this exhibition space, visitors take their place, but instead of judging the game on the field, you judge what happens off it. You will be presented with situations from today’s football and then make a decision. Is it okay that some players earn so much more than others? What about violence or racism? How (un)healthy is heading the ball? And can every football logo still be acceptable, or do some people find certain ones offensive?

These themes are further explored during discussion evenings. Under the title “Canteen Issues”, each month during the exhibition, a specific challenge in the world of modern football is examined. Topics include:

“Who owns the football club?” (covering financing models, ownership, and the role of supporters)
“Is inclusion an illusion?”
“Is playing football healthy?” (addressing physical health, e.g., heading and dementia, as well as mental health)
“Together or against each other?” (focusing on discrimination, supporter ethics, parents on the sidelines, etc.)

…and more.

Bigger picture

It is clear that the exhibition is about more than football; it deals with migration, war and peace, urban development, emancipation, and so on.

After the VAR room, there is a space about the social responsibility of football clubs today. Across Europe, dozens of foundations—often linked to professional football clubs—use the power of football for unifying and empowering projects and activities. Since the 2024–2025 season, this social work has been a licensing requirement for professional football clubs. Clubs must also demonstrate their commitment to social responsibility to obtain a European license. This room shows how this is done in Ghent and in other Belgian professional football clubs.

The theme of identity and inclusion appears in several parts of the exhibition. There are the previously mentioned examples of Fenichel, women’s football, deaf football, and neighborhood football. Equally important is the story of Léon Mokuna, which touches on Belgian colonial history, discrimination, and racism. This is also explored further in the VAR room, where KAA Gent icon and 2015 Belgian Golden Shoe winner Sven Kums created a Lego artwork about Leon Mokuna and his role both on and off the pitch as the first Black African player in the Belgian top division.

Football and new audiences for the museum

To be honest, I’d never been to STAM before, but I was pleasantly surprised – what a beautiful venue!!! I thought the exhibition was beautifully designed: relatable, pleasant, and covering all levels of football. “I’ll definitely go back with my mom, who unfortunately couldn’t be there on the opening night (Carine Dhondt, daughter of Léon Mokuna, the first Black football player of KAA Gent and on the highest level of Belgium football).

The exhibition attracts a new audience: supporters for whom it may be their first time setting foot in a museum. For them, we are specifically aiming for an accessible, interactive, and immersive exhibition experience. We hope to engage these new visitors in a lasting and meaningful way.

Conversely, the exhibition offers an opportunity to engage traditional museum visitors and those interested in Ghent’s city history—who may have little prior interest in football—with the city’s rich football heritage. It will help demonstrate that football is an important part of Ghent’s social and cultural history.

Thinking points

People working with heritage and football culture, could reflect on this article how they might build new partnerships between football and cultural stakeholders.