World Cup dark horses Belgium will have to resolve club and country identity crisis

In the first of a five-part series on teams likely to make a splash in Brazil, Ian Hawkey talks about the Belgian stars who have flattered to deceive as a team.

The Belgium team is a nice blend with many club honours for players as individuals, but nothing to show at the international level. Eric Vidal / Reuters

It is not too hard to list the reasons why Belgium have been installed as fifth or sixth favourites for the World Cup. Let us start with the freshly minted medals and start from the defence.

There are golds from Spain’s Primera Liga, collected last month by goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois and defender Toby Alderweireld, two young Belgians who helped make Atletico Madrid so hard to beat in Spain’s compelling title race.

In captain Vincent Kompany’s luggage there is the second of his English Premier League winners’ medals, achieved last month with Manchester City. Daniel Van Buyten, the veteran centre-half, has just won yet another Bundesliga with Bayern Munich.

While we are still on the defenders, there is Thomas Vermaelen’s English FA Cup, with Arsenal.

It goes on through a catalogue that includes a Coppa Italia (Dries Mertens, of Napoli), Kompany’s English League Cup, runners-up medals from the Champions League (Courtois and Alderweireld), and from the Premier League (Simon Mignolet, of Liverpool).

There is the English Professional Footballers’ Association’s Young Player of the Year trophy, for which Eden Hazard beat compatriot Adnan Januzaj of Manchester United.

Scroll back over the past 13 months and there are many, many more. All of which fully endorses the idea that a Belgian squad with a good spread of experience and youth should be taken seriously.

But these are club decorations; Belgium’s record as a national team this side of the millennium is almost entirely blank.

Of the 32 World Cup finalists, only Colombia and debutants Bosnia-Herzegovina – a state that only came into existence in the 1990s – have less recent experience of the tournament’s final stages.

That is partly why Belgium intrigue: a collection of household names, genuine stars, but in a national jersey that a generation of supporters outside the small country would struggle to recognise.

Belgium’s last appearance on football’s most elevated stage was at the 2002 World Cup. They failed to qualify for Euro 2004, 2008 and 2012 as well as Germany 2006 and South Africa 2010.

Against that backdrop, coach Marc Wilmots’s stated ambition is “simply to get through the first phase”.

After the barren years, that would count as considerable progress. But he knows the spread of quality in his squad means expectations are higher than that.

“We have everything to lose up until that stage. After that, we’ll have nothing to lose,” he said.

Wilmots, who, as a player, was a hard-working midfielder with a sweet first touch and participated in his fourth World Cup in 2002, deserves much of the credit for galvanising the golden generation.

He likes to say he was drawn to the job “because I was tired of commentating on World Cups without my own to team to back”.

He has had other careers since hanging up his boots. He even briefly entered politics.

You do not need to be a politician to notice how much Belgium has changed as a country, even in the period between 2002 and 2014. Brussels is Europe’s political centre and the capital of a nation defined along linguistic lines – sometimes the national team’s failings have been blamed on a perceived lack of cohesion between French and Flemish speakers – but has been enriched by immigration.

A significant part of Wilmots’ job description is persuading Belgians with dual nationality to commit to the team.

Januzaj’s case was quite a saga. The teenager, born and schooled in Belgium, has Kosovan-Albanian parentage and a family lineage that reaches to Turkey.

Kompany could have played for the Democratic Republic of Congo, while striker Romelu Lukaku’s father played up front for DR Congo when it was known as Zaire.

Midfielder Moussa Dembele’s father is from Mali, and Axel Witsel’s Martiniquais parentage made him eligible for France, who would certainly have valued his tough, disciplined organisation of a midfield.

Nacer Chadli, Dembele’s Tottenham Hotspur colleague, played senior international football for Morocco, but only in a friendly; he then switched to his country of birth.

Manchester United’s Marouane Fellaini had the same choice.

Januzaj only tied himself to Wilmot’s squad once World Cup qualification had been secured, doubtless impressed by the style in which they pushed past Croatia and Serbia to guarantee their ticket to Brazil.

They keep a tidy defence and, though they have lost a significant striking option with injury to Christian Benteke, they have attacking potency in various positions: from defenders who pose a threat at attacking set pieces, to Hazard, Kevin Mirallas and Dries Mertens just off the main striker.

On paper, Wilmots has an abundance of possibilities and just a thick layer of World Cup rust to sand off if the country are to shine.

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