After a 90-year wait, a 12th title for Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, revived by Tony Bloom
Now the owner, who has also rejuvenated Brighton and made them into prolific talent incubators, is hoping to finalise a 29% stake in Hearts and work his magic in Scotland.
This piece was commissioned for the new Nutmeg Substack and I’m writing for them once a month. Those pieces will appear here, and over there. More about Nutmeg, the Scottish Football Quarterly, later.
Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, aka Union SG, were once the most successful football club in Belgium. Founded in 1897, they won the first of their 11 league titles in 1904, and their 11th in 1935, and ever since then it’s been one long wait for more title glory.
That wait is now over, however, after they bagged the win they needed to seal the Belgian title on Sunday evening, beating Gent 3-1.
Their fortunes have been transformed since May 2018, when Tony Bloom, (now 55, and pictured below) became the majority shareholder at Union SG.
His friend and business partner, Alex Muzio, 41, who spent years working at Bloom’s StarLizard data business, has been majority owner since 2023, and chairman before that. That restructuring had to happen because Bloom could no longer own majority shares into two clubs, Brighton and Union SG, who might have come up against each other in the 2023-24 Europa League.
We’ll move on shortly to the youthful and innovative executive set-up that Bloom put into place after arriving in Brussels in 2018. Suffice to say they have had roaring success, on and off the pitch.
That is now especially relevant to Scottish football as Bloom waits for an imminent decision on whether Heart of Midlothian will accept his offer of an investment of £9.86m for 29% of Hearts.
A consultation period with the club’s majority shareholders – the Foundation of Hearts – has been underway for weeks and a landslide in excess of 98% voter approval was announced yesterday. A club AGM will confirm this before a rubber-stamping by the SFA of Bloom’s investment.
As we reported on this site back in October, the almost £10m in funds will clearly be important for Hearts but arguably more exciting for Jambos fans and the wider Scottish game is seeing whether Bloom can do with data what he was already done at Brighton and Union SG.
It’s the top secret talent-spotting algorithm and best-in-class data that has underpinned the transformations at both clubs.
Player acquisition and trading have been central to both and today we'll dig into particulars of how Union SG have operated over the past seven years.
As recently as 1997-98, Brighton finished 23rd in the fourth tier of the English football pyramid, just one place above Doncaster Rovers, who were relegated to the non-league.
Some rollercoaster years in the Noughties saw the Seagulls rise and fall from the fourth tier to the second-tier Championship and back to the third-tier League One.
Union SG have also had their own trip down the fourth tier of their game before the remarkable re-shaping of the club under Bloom and Muzio, and before we get into the strategies that have worked for Union - and might indeed work at Tynecastle, I’m going to …
Recap Union SG’s sorry fall from grace after 1935.
Detail the key five-man executive team who have transformer Union SG, including the “hands off” Bloom and the hands-on Muzio, who commutes to his club match days via the Eurostar from his home in London.
Explore how taking some punts on players that other clubs wouldn’t risk have, in some cases, paid off spectacularly.
Detail how the Union SG transfer policy in the last three years in particular has had considerably more hits than misses, with many players fitting straight into the system, and increasing their values accordingly.