Club NXT

Club NXT has no old enemy the way most sides do. Too young for that, and its only regular grudge match comes down to geography rather than history: trips to KV Kortrijk or KV Oostende get billed in the local press as a West Flanders derby, simply because all three clubs share the same corner of Belgium.

The team exists to feed a bigger one. On 1 July 2020, Club Brugge turned its youth academy into a stand-alone reserve side, after that academy's reserve team had won the Reserve Pro League the season before. Club NXT took up its place in the Challenger Pro League, the country's second tier, and opened that campaign away to RWDM47 on 22 August 2020.

Home games are played some 25 kilometres from Bruges, at The NEST in Roeselare — a ground better known under its old name, Schiervelde Stadion, and holding 8,340. The club's paperwork still lists Bruges as its legal seat; its football happens in Roeselare.

Blue and black, the same shirt as the first team, and much the same story off the pitch: NXT carries no nickname of its own, referred to in databases as Blauw-Zwart or simply by the parent club's name. What it does carry is a production line. Antonio Nusa and Arne Engels both wore the shirt before moving on to bigger stages, part of a run that has also passed through Maxim De Cuyper and Noah Mbamba.

Silverware has stayed modest — third place in the Challenger Pro League in 2022/23 remains the best league finish since promotion, with no title to date. The job here was never to win it, only to get players ready for Bruges, and that work continues week to week in Roeselare's second tier.