Zulte Waregem

Waregem's derby carries a name unlike most in Belgian football: the Vlasico, a pun on flax — vlas, the crop that once defined this corner of West Flanders — grafted onto Clásico. The opponent is Kortrijk, and the fixture is one of the few threads connecting SV Zulte Waregem to a past it doesn't legally own. The club itself dates only to 1 July 2001, formed when Zultse VV and KSV Waregem combined operations. KSV Waregem, founded in 1925 as Waereghem Sportif, had gone under financially that year; its old league championships from the 1960s stayed with a club that, on paper, no longer existed. The matricule number the new entity carries, 5381, traces instead to Zultse VV's own lineage, back through a 1976 merger to a club founded in 1950. What survived from Waregem was mostly the shirt: red and white on the pitch, even though red and green remain the club's stated colours.

The honours built since 2001 are modest and mostly domestic seconds and cups: promotion as Third Division group winners in 2001–02, the Second Division title in 2004–05, the Belgian Cup in 2005–06 and again in 2016–17, and, most recently, the Challenger Pro League title in 2024–25. Home matches are played at the Elindus Arena, capacity 12,414, a ground still known to older supporters by its previous name, the Regenboogstadion.

The club's best-known export left as a loan player. Thorgan Hazard spent two seasons at Waregem between 2012 and 2014, made 73 appearances, scored 18 goals, and was named the Belgian league's best player before Borussia Mönchengladbach and then Borussia Dortmund took him on to a full Belgium career. More recently it was Jelle Vossen, back at the club from 2020, who top-scored the entire second division in 2024–25 and pushed Essevee back into the top flight himself.