Seven clubs played the first Belgian championship in 1895-96, a round-robin among gentlemen amateurs: Antwerp FC, FC Brugeois, FC Liegeois, RC de Bruxelles, Leopold Club de Bruxelles, SC de Bruxelles, and Union d'Ixelles. The trophy went to FC Liegeois — modern RFC Liege, still around, currently in lower divisions, still proud of being first. For the first decade, the title bounced almost entirely between Liegeois and RC de Bruxelles. Then Union Saint-Gilloise won four in a row from 1903-04, the Bruges and Brussels rivalries took shape, and a sport that had begun as a curiosity in British factory enclaves became, by the eve of the First World War, a Belgian institution. The first eight champions in Belgian football were all won by FC Liegeois or RC de Bruxelles — a duopoly that didn't last.

Bert De Cleyn was a striker for KV Mechelen who played 395 matches between 1932 and 1954, on either side of a World War, and scored 350 goals in them. The career figure remains the all-time record in Belgian top-flight football — though De Cleyn won the Belgian First Division top scorer title only once, in 1945-46, because the award was not introduced until he had already scored most of his goals. He shares the top of the all-time list with names every Belgian football fan can recite: Joseph Mermans, the great Anderlecht striker of the postwar boom, 339 goals; Bernard Voorhoof, Lierse's pre-war hero, 281 in 473 matches and the national team's joint all-time top scorer alongside Paul Van Himst. The Belgian league has always produced finishers. The country is small, the academies are sharp, and the pipeline to Europe's bigger leagues runs constantly — Eden Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, Thibaut Courtois all came through here.

From the late 1940s into the 21st century, one name keeps reappearing in the champion column: RSC Anderlecht. The club from the southwest of Brussels has 34 Belgian titles, more than any rival, including a Belgian record five-in-a-row between 1963-64 and 1967-68 under the team that built itself around Paul Van Himst. Van Himst played for Anderlecht for nineteen years and scored more than three hundred league goals; in 1960 he was voted Belgian Sportsman of the Year at age seventeen. The European trophies followed: Anderlecht won the Cup Winners' Cup in 1976 and 1978, lost the 1977 final to Hamburg, took the UEFA Cup in 1983. Club Brugge, KV Mechelen, and Standard Liege each lifted European silverware in the 1970s and 1980s — Mechelen winning the Cup Winners' Cup in 1988, beating Ajax in the final. It was Belgian football's golden generation in Europe.

In 2009, Belgian football tried something other leagues had tried and abandoned. After thirty regular-season matches between sixteen clubs, the top six entered a Championship Playoff in which all points carried from the regular season were halved. The clubs ranked 7th through 14th went into a separate Europa League playoff, and the bottom two clubs faced relegation. The drama compounded; titles were often decided on the final weekend. Critics pointed at the Dutch Eredivisie, which had tried playoffs and dropped them after three seasons. Belgian fans split. The playoffs produced champions like KAA Gent in 2015 (their first ever Belgian title) and a remarkable run of five championships in seven years for Club Brugge between 2016 and 2022. Then, in early 2025, with UEFA adding four extra European matchdays per season and the calendar bursting, Belgian clubs agreed to drop the playoff format from 2026-27 onwards and expand the top division from sixteen to eighteen teams. The grand experiment will have lasted seventeen seasons.

And then Union Saint-Gilloise came back. After winning eleven championships in the league's first forty years, the Brussels club spent decades in the lower divisions, relegated and re-relegated, propping up Belgian football's middle tier from a tiny stadium called the Stade Joseph Marien, tucked into a city park where the trees overhang the touchline. In 2021 they earned promotion to the top flight after a forty-eight-year absence. In their first season back, 2021-22, they topped the regular season standings and entered the Championship Playoff in first place. They led the league deep into May. Club Brugge eventually overtook them and won a third consecutive title, but Union had reminded everyone what the league knows about itself: that the small club from Saint-Gilles, whose record sixty-game unbeaten run started one Christmas Day in 1932, was never quite finished. They finally lifted the trophy again in 2024-25, ninety years after their last championship. The pipeline of memory in Belgian football is very long.