New RBFA president Paul Van den Bulck, in charge since June, and chief executive Peter Bossaert have been in Switzerland for meetings with UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin and other senior UEFA officials.
Talks at the House of European Football in Nyon focused on important behind-the-scenes developments in Belgian football, including the construction of the new RBFA headquarters in Tubize, some 25 kilometers south of the Belgian capital, Brussels.
The association’s green administrative offices, due to open officially later this month, are now located on the same site as the impressive RBFA Proximus Basecamp national training centre, meaning the heart of Belgian football now beats entirely within the Tubize campus.
UEFA has played an essential role in this positive development by providing funding through the European body’s HatTrick development programme, which helped build the association’s new headquarters and national training centre.
development drive
The centralization of the RBFA’s administrative and sporting infrastructure in one place bears fruit in a long-term development strategy deployed by the association to establish a “centre of excellence” serving Belgian football.
“Bringing together all the activities of the Royal Belgian Football Federation is part of an overall goal: to make our association a true sports organization,” 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 all our sporting and administrative departments together in one place within this new eco-responsible work environment at Tubize,” they added.
“In recent years, our association has evolved a lot to become a modern organization where good governance and diversity of profiles prevail, and our new federal building materially symbolizes the new era in which the association has truly entered.”
Staff Offices – Training Facilities
The new headquarters of the Belgian FA includes staff offices for more than 230 employees, conference rooms, an auditorium, press and media conference rooms, a VAR studio and a restaurant.
The Proximus Basecamp training center is home to the Belgian national teams and referees, the offices of the sports technical department, support services and management.
This 24-hectare facility currently houses eight courses (7 outdoor and 1 indoor), with three more outdoor courses under construction. There are also, among others, two street soccer fields, 12 changing rooms, professional referees’ offices, a clubhouse and a four-star hotel to accommodate athletes, members and guests.
Proximus Basecamp offers optimal training conditions for Belgium’s senior and junior national teams, while also organizing warm-up matches and international tournaments for junior teams along with education workshops/conferences for coaches and referees and other football-related events. Belgian and foreign clubs also train and/or organize their courses at the center.
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 culture shift’
Paul van den Bulck and Peter Bossaert hailed the developments at the Tubize complex as “a great cultural change that is inspiring all of our staff and all of our visitors.”
“Now, we are able to receive, in excellent conditions and in the same place, all the football players and all the activities related to the practice of football at the highest level. Consequently, everything radiates a constant search for [high] performance.”
Read how football is developing in Belgium