The Fiasco of the Golden Shoe (Boot)

For a quick change of direction, I want to comment on something from the Belgian World of Sports. The yearly award of the Golden Shoe ("Boot" if you are English).

The Belgian football league has an award that it presents every year to the best football (soccer) player in the Belgian league. An "MVP" award. On the surface you might say "Big Deal". What sport doesn't have such an award? However, there are some peculiarities to the award here in Belgoland.

First, one team completely dominates the award. This year marks the third time that all winners (They also have an award for best Rookie and best goaltender.) came from R.S.C. Anderlecht. The other two times were in 1965 and 2000. All in all, Anderlecht has had the winners of 18 trophies since it first was awarded in 1954. Only Club Brugge (10) and Standaard de Liege (6) have more than a couple of wins. The joke this year is that the top 4 contenders were all from Anderlecht despite the fact they don't even have the lead in the competition. Racing Genk is 3 points in the lead after the first half of the season.

The other rarity of this award is that it is not based on a player's performance during a season, but during a calendar year. This year's winnar Mbark Boussouffa, a Dutchman with Morokkan roots, earned most of his points for his performance during last January - June while still playing at AA Gent. An irony as the official winners-listing puts him only down for Anderlecht.

I was rather surprized at this year's awards ceremony as it was so "Flemish". French was only spoken when interviewing players who didn't speak Dutch. While it would be fair to say that most of the money in the Belgian First Class and National Team comes from the Flemish side (11 of the 18 teams are clearly Flemish with 2 Brussels teams including Anderlecht), such an oversight seems to ostricate the French-speaking fans. Maybe there is a separate competition in Wallonia, but I'm not aware of it.

In any case, like much of Belgian Football (soccer), the overhaul needed to clean up this mess probably crosses too many cultural boundaries to even be considered and the final loser is the Belgian sports fan who hasn't seen more than 4 different teams vie for the championship in the last decade. In the last 20 years, Anderlecht has won 10 titles, Club Brugge (7), Genk (2) with Lierse (1997) and Mechelen (1989) the only outsiders from this exclusive club. Even Standard de Liege, once a powerhouse, hasn't won a championship since 1983 although they have come close a number of times.

As stated in my last post, European sports leagues including the Jupiler League could learn something from America. Salary caps, shared TV ratings and even things like the draft and farm systems help our leagues remain more competitive with more possibilities for any team to "win it all" than in most European Soccer Leagues and I'd look forward to the day they adopted some of these practices.