Beerschot Wilrijk

The Kielstadion on Antwerp's south side seats 12,771. Beerschot did not grow up in it. The club arrived in 2013, taking over the ground at the moment the historic Beerschot AC went bankrupt and its identity was left without a team to carry it.

What moved in was a club from Wilrijk, founded in 1921 as Football Club Wilrijk, which had merged with a neighbouring side in 1993 and until then had no claim on the Beerschot name at all. Adopting it changed the scale of everything. Between 2013 and 2017 the team climbed from the provincial leagues of Antwerp to the national amateur first division, winning the Eerste Provinciale Antwerpen in its first season under the new banner and the Vierde Klasse C the year after.

The paperwork followed the football. In 2017 the club was granted the royal title. Two years later it became Koninklijke Beerschot Voetbalclub Antwerpen and paid 40,000 euros for matriculation number 13 — the registration number that had belonged to the old Beerschot, and the closest thing Belgian football has to a birth certificate. The seven league titles and two cups won under that number in the previous century remain with the club that won them; they are part of the story told at the Kielstadion, not part of the honours board of the side playing there.

The 2023/24 season ended with the Challenger Pro League title and promotion to the Pro League, which returned top-flight football to the ground for the first time since the collapse.

The purple and white are what supporters use to name themselves — the Purple White Army — though around the Kiel the older habit persists, and the people in the stands are still De Kielse Ratten, the Kiel rats, a name the neighbourhood gave them long before this club existed.