Club Brugge's first home ground was a rat-baiting pit owned by terrier fans
Club Brugge began life playing on a patch of Bruges known as the Rattenplein, the rats' ground. It belonged to the local fox terrier club, which used it for rat baiting, another English import in which dogs chased down and killed rats. From those odd beginnings came Belgium's only European Cup finalist.
The club traces its roots to 1890, when students from a Catholic school and a secular one joined forces and adopted the Latin motto for a healthy mind in a healthy body. The official founding date is 13 November 1891. Its first league title came in the 1919–20 season, after which it added the royal designation still reflected in the letters KV. Leaner decades followed: relegation in 1928 and long stretches in the second tier during the 1940s and 1950s. Since returning to the top flight after 1958–59, though, Brugge has never gone down again.
The golden era arrived under the Austrian coach Ernst Happel, who won three league titles in a row in the mid-1970s. He took Brugge to the 1976 UEFA Cup final, lost narrowly over two legs to Liverpool, and then to the 1978 European Cup final at Wembley, where the same opponents won through a single second-half goal from Kenny Dalglish. No other Belgian club has reached that final.
Brugge also owns a quirky slice of history: on 25 November 1992 its Nigerian striker Daniel Amokachi scored the first goal of the newly branded Champions League, the winner against CSKA Moscow. The club holds Belgian records for cup and Super Cup wins and a European record of twenty consecutive Europa League appearances, while its 20 league titles trail only its great rival Anderlecht.
Home since 1975 has been a stadium renamed in 1998 after Jan Breydel, a butcher who led a medieval rising against French overlords. Brugge shares it with city neighbours Cercle Brugge. Plans for a new ground have dragged on since 2007, stalled partly by endangered wildlife on proposed sites.
Source: Club Brugge KV
