Tubize: The beating heart of Belgian football
Wednesday, September 7, 2022
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Key milestones are being reached in the Royal Belgian Football Association’s (RBFA) ambitious long-term development strategy.
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The new RBFA President Paul Van den Bulck – at the helm since June – and CEO Peter Bossaert have been in Switzerland to meet UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin and other senior UEFA officials.
Talks at the House of European Football in Nyon centred on important developments behind the scenes in Belgian football, including the construction of the RBFA’s new headquarters at Tubize, some 25 kilometres south of the Belgian capital Brussels.
The association’s eco-friendly administrative offices, which will be officially inaugurated later this month, are now based on the same site as the impressive RBFA Proximus Basecamp national training centre – meaning that Belgian football’s heart now beats entirely within the Tubize campus.
UEFA has played an essential role in this positive development by providing funding via the European body's HatTrick development programme, which helped the construction of the new association headquarters and national training centre.
Development drive
The centralisation of the RBFA’s administrative and sporting infrastructures at the one single location brings to fruition a long-term development strategy rolled out by the association to establish a “centre of excellence” at the service of Belgian football.
“Bringing together all of the Royal Belgian Football Association’s activities is part of an overall objective – to make our association a real sports organisation,” said Paul Van den Bulck and Peter Bossaert in a joint statement ahead of the meeting with UEFA in Nyon.
“The idea was to bring together all our sports and administrative departments in the same place within this new eco-responsible working environment in Tubize,” they added.
“In recent years, our association has evolved a lot to become a modern organisation where good governance and diversity of profiles prevail, and our new federal building materially symbolises the new era that the association has now truly entered.”
Staff offices – training facilities
The Belgian FA’s new headquarters include staff offices for over 230 employees, conference rooms, an auditorium, press conference and media rooms, a VAR studio and a restaurant.
The Proximus Basecamp training centre is the home of the Belgian national teams and referees, the offices of the sports technical department, the support services and management.
This 24-hectare centre currently hosts eight pitches (7 outdoor and 1 indoor), and three more outdoor pitches are under construction. There are also, among others, two pitches for street football, 12 dressing rooms, professional referee offices, a club house, and a four-star hotel to accommodate athletes, partners and guests.
Proximus Basecamp provides optimal training conditions for both Belgian national senior and youth teams, while also hosting preparation matches and international youth team tournaments alongside coach and referee education workshops/conferences and other football-related events. Belgian and foreign clubs also train and/or organise their courses at the centre.
The new RBFA building is situated in the heart of the training centre – so everyone who comes to the Tubize campus enjoys a constant feeling of close involvement in the evolution of Belgian football.
‘Great cultural change’
Paul van den Bulck and Peter Bossaert hailed developments at the Tubize complex as “a great cultural change which is inspiring all our staff and all our visitors.”
“Now, we are able to welcome, in excellent conditions and in the same place, all of football’s actors and all the activities related to the playing of football at the highest level. Consequently, everything radiates a constant search for [high] performance.”