Last year, a good friend of mine Lance Davids and I made the trip to Sclessin. Standard Liège vs a side I've honestly forgotten in the Jupiler Pro League. There, what stuck with me wasn't the result, it was the atmosphere. The Ultras Inferno section had something going — pyrotechnics, a wall of sound, the kind of noise that makes you feel the game differently even if the football isn't actually that good. I remember thinking: this club has something to work with that money alone can't create.
Then I started actually looking at the club — the numbers, the squad, the history of the last few years — and the picture got more complicated. Interesting, but complicated.
What Standard actually are right now
Standard de Liège are one of those clubs that exist in a permanent tension between what they once were and what they currently have. European football history, a fanbase that would fill a ground twice the size on the right night, a city identity that's wrapped up in the club in a way you don't always find. And a squad that, for most of the last five years, hasn't matched the weight of that expectation.
The ownership situation has been complicated. The Duchâtelet era left deep marks — years of cost-cutting, a rotation of coaches, players who didn't fit the club's identity, a fanbase that was regularly alienated. They've moved through that now, but the legacy isn't just historical. It shows up in the squad composition, the wage structure, the way recruitment decisions have sometimes been reactive rather than strategic.
What you have now is a club that's trying to rebuild around something real, without quite having all the pieces in place yet.
The style question
One of the things I kept going back to when studying Standard is that the style question is still genuinely unsettled. And I don't mean that as a criticism — I mean it as an observation about where they are in a process.
They have the physical capacity to play intensely. They press in stretches, they transition quickly when the opportunity is there, and they have wide players who can hurt teams on the break. But they also have long periods of possession where the structure isn't quite right — the spacing gets too narrow, the circulation goes sideways too long, the final ball in the last twenty metres doesn't come from a position that genuinely threatens.
You can trace that inconsistency back partly to recruitment: the squad has been assembled across different eras and coaching ideas, so the players' understanding of what "Standard football" looks like isn't unified. Some of them were bought for a high-press system. Some arrived when the priority was staying up. Some are genuinely good players who don't quite fit the current direction.
What the atmosphere at Sclessin does — and this is actually relevant to the football analysis, not just the vibe — is it creates a home context where the team can get away with an imperfect 90 minutes and still win. That has value. It also masks problems that need solving rather than shouting over.
The squad profile
Standard's squad has a number of players who are interesting in isolation but don't obviously connect into a coherent identity. You have profiles that suit a direct, physical game. You have profiles that suit a more technical, possession-based approach. You have a handful of players who are excellent in specific contexts — transitions, set pieces, wide areas — but who ask very different things of their teammates.
The result is a squad that can beat anyone on a good day because the individual quality is real. And a squad that can look badly organised on a bad day because the collective picture isn't settled.
The specific challenge in Belgian football — which is relevant here — is that you're competing in a league where one club (Club Brugge) can genuinely sustain a European identity for a full season, and several others (Union, Anderlecht, Gent) have stabilised around a game model that's consistent week to week. Standard are not there yet in terms of consistency, even if the individual talent on certain days is as good as anyone's.
What would building actually look like
This is where the "building" framing starts to matter. Standard aren't in a position where they need to tear everything down. The fanbase is real. The infrastructure at Sclessin is real. The identity of the city — working class, loud, passionate — is a genuine asset that most clubs would pay for.
What they need is clarity. A game model that's committed to over at least two or three transfer windows. Recruitment that serves that model rather than chasing individual quality in isolation. A squad where the players know what they're supposed to do, and know what it looks like when they're doing it well.
The clubs in Belgium that have got this right recently — Union Saint-Gilloise is the obvious example — did it by choosing a style and sticking to it even when the results were difficult. That process creates a squad that knows itself, and a fanbase that understands what they're watching. Standard's fanbase already knows they're watching Standard. They're waiting for the club to know it too.
The trip to Sclessin reminded me that football clubs are cultural institutions as much as sporting ones. Standard have the culture. The sporting part — the clarity of identity, the coherence of the squad — is the work that's still in front of them. But walking away from that ground, you don't doubt that the foundation is there.