KV Mechelen

The men who put their names to KV Mechelen in October 1904 were students — Catholic boys from a French-speaking grammar school in the town, from a boarding school at Alsemberg, from the university at Leuven — and they did their founding in a pub on the IJzerenleen called the Cave de Munich. The rules took another few months; they were drafted at Leuven in February 1905. The club they set up was called Football Club Malinois, and the name kept changing as the language politics of Belgium moved around it: royal patronage in 1929, a Dutch spelling of that royal title in 1952, and in 1970 the full switch to Koninklijke Voetbalclub Mechelen.

Everything the club is known for outside Belgium happened in about two years at the end of the 1980s. The Belgian Cup came in 1987 and carried Mechelen into the Cup Winners' Cup, which they won the following spring by beating Ajax 1–0 in the final. The Super Cup followed that autumn, PSV Eindhoven beaten 3–1 over two legs, and the league title arrived in 1989. Nearly four decades on, no Belgian club has won a European trophy since.

The collapse came in late 2002. Debt forced the club into voluntary liquidation, and what saved it was a rescue mounted by supporters and former players — enough to hold on to matricule 25 and the history attached to it. Since then the full name has been Yellow Red Koninklijke Voetbalclub Mechelen. The climb back ran through the third division in 2005 and, much later, a second-division title in 2019 that came in the same season as a second Belgian Cup.

Home is still Achter de Kazerne, on the Kleine Nieuwedijkstraat, though the sponsors call it the AFAS Stadion now. A €9.1m rebuild between 2015 and 2019 added more than 4,000 seats, taking it to 16,672 — yellow and red stripes, black shorts, in the province of Antwerp.