He was sixteen years old when the season started. Romelu Lukaku, born in Antwerp in May 1993, had been promoted into RSC Anderlecht's first team and spent the 2009-10 Belgian Pro League scoring goals against grown men. By the time the regular competition ended, he had finished as topscorer of the entire Belgian top division — the youngest player ever to do so. He was still a teenager. Anderlecht, the club he was playing for, finished first as well, the purple-and-white of Brussels carrying off another league championship as part of a domestic dominance no Belgian club has equalled. This was the season Lukaku announced himself to Europe, and the season the Constant Vanden Stock Stadium gave its faithful another trophy to add to a long shelf.
The 2009-10 campaign was only the second season of the new Belgian Pro League format, which had split the championship into a regular phase followed by two play-off groups: a championship play-off for the top six clubs, and a Europa League play-off for clubs finishing seventh through fifteenth. The system had been criticised — it scrambled the points teams had earned over a long season — but it also concentrated the late-season drama. Anderlecht emerged from the regular phase in good shape and held off the chasing pack through the championship play-off to take the title. Lukaku's name topped the regular-competition scoring chart, ahead of more established attackers like Tom De Sutter of Anderlecht and Matías Suárez of the same club. Because the play-off goals were tracked separately (teams played different numbers of matches across the two groups), they did not count toward the official topscorer trophy, and that left Lukaku, on regular-season goals alone, as the official king of the strikers.
While Anderlecht handled the championship, KRC Genk took the long route to Europe. In the Europa League play-off, Genk won 5-2 on aggregate, then beat the fourth-placed team from the championship play-off 5-3 on aggregate in a testmatch decider to claim a spot in the third qualifying round of the 2010-11 UEFA Europa League. The second qualifying round place went to Cercle Brugge, the unusual beneficiary of Belgian cup geometry: Cercle were the runners-up of the 2009-10 Belgian Cup, but the winners — KAA Gent — had already qualified for the Champions League, so the European place flowed down the bracket. The first goal of the entire season had been scored on 31 July 2009 by Cephas Chimedza for Sint-Truiden against Standard Liège, twenty-four minutes into the opener. The first hat-trick belonged to Milan Jovanović of Standard, against Roeselare on 15 August. The fastest goal of the season — fifty-eight seconds — came from Sherjill MacDonald of Germinal Beerschot against Roeselare on 28 November.
Look at the scoring sheets and the squad rosters of 2009-10 Belgian football and what stands out is how many of those names would later show up across Europe. Kevin De Bruyne, then eighteen, was at Genk, scoring his first senior goals. Romelu Lukaku, sixteen, was lighting up the regular season at Anderlecht — within a year Chelsea would buy him. Axel Witsel was at Standard Liège, Steven Defour also at Standard. Mehdi Carcela-González, Dieumerci Mbokani, Eliaquim Mangala, Igor De Camargo, Marvin Ogunjimi, Ivan Perišić at Club Brugge, Joseph Akpala, Nabil Dirar — the Belgian Pro League that season was a finishing school whose graduates would scatter to England, Spain, Germany, France, China. Belgian football was on the cusp of its golden generation, and the 2009-10 season was a long, often grinding showcase for the players who were about to make Belgium a top-five FIFA-ranked nation. They were playing in front of a few thousand fans on cold nights in Lokeren and Mouscron. They were about to play in Champions League finals.
The Belgian Pro League is played across the country; the geographic centre of the 2009-10 competition was Anderlecht's Constant Vanden Stock Stadium at 50.8324 N, 4.2998 E, in Astrid Park, southwest Brussels. From altitude, line up the Brussels-Charleroi Canal and look for the stadium just south of it, set inside the green of Astrid Park. The 2009-10 season also featured matches at Club Brugge's Jan Breydel (about 80 km northwest), Standard Liège's Sclessin (about 95 km east), and Genk's Cristal Arena (about 80 km east-northeast). Recommended viewing altitude over the Vanden Stock Stadium 1,500-3,000 ft AGL. Brussels (EBBR) is 12 km east-northeast; coordinate with EBBR TMA.