Lommel United

The Soevereinstadion opened in 1992, and it has held 8,000 since. The name changed from Stedelijk Sportstadion along the way; the ground did not, and the club has kept playing there through a run of mergers that would have unmoored a less settled side.

Those mergers are most of the story. KFC Lommel SK, founded in 1932 and taken into the federation the following year, went bankrupt in 2003. What survived of it was absorbed by Overpelt — itself a 1937 club, originally Vlug & Vrij Overpelt-Fabriek — and the result played as KVSK United Overpelt-Lommel. Racing Mol-Wezel was taken in in 2010, and the name became Lommel United. In 2022 it formally adopted matriculation number 1986, the old KFC number, in place of the 2554 it had inherited from the Overpelt line.

The 2001 Belgian Cup final belongs to the older club, and it was lost to Westerlo. That side had also gone into the Intertoto Cup in 1997 and again in 1998. Timmy Simons came through it before captaining Belgium and playing for Anderlecht and PSV.

Hans Vanaken played here under the United name, and left for Gent and then Club Brugge and the national side. Leandro Trossard, now at Arsenal, spent a loan spell in Lommel on his way out of Genk. Wouter Schellen holds the appearance record.

The green and white — De Groen-Witten, the Green-Whites — comes from the older line too. So does the local edge: the club as it now exists was assembled from Overpelt and from Mol-Wezel, both neighbours in the same corner of Limburg.