Offside – Football in the City 2026

Offside – Football in the City: Ghent's Most Emotional Exhibition of 2025–2026

Football makes people weep, cheer, argue, and reconcile. It shapes neighbourhoods, reflects migration, and carries the weight of entire communities' identities across generations. And nowhere in Belgium is that truth more visible than in Ghent — a city that has been home to over 1,400 football clubs since 1875 and whose relationship with the beautiful game has never been simple, always been passionate, and never been fully told.

Until now. "Offside – Football in the City" at the STAM Ghent City Museum is the exhibition that finally tells it. Open from 28 November 2025 until 26 May 2026, this is described by Football Makes History as designed to be "the most emotional exhibition of the 2025–2026 cultural season" — and by those who have visited it, that description proves accurate within the first five minutes.

Tickets are priced at €14 and available at stamgent.be. Gallery texts are available in Dutch, French, and English.

Three Anniversaries, One Exhibition

The timing of Offside is not accidental. Three significant anniversaries in Ghent's football history came together in 2025 and 2026 to give the STAM the impetus for an exhibition of this scope:

• 150 years of football in Ghent (the first clubs in the city were founded around 1875)
• 125 years of Racing Gent (KRC Gent, the oldest still-existing football club in Ghent, founded in 1899)
• 100 years of KAA Gent (the city's professional club, founded in 1900 under the name Ons Gantoise)

Three anniversaries, two years of research, more than 500 football objects on display — 125 of which come directly from the Collection KAA Gent, managed by the KAA Gent Foundation as its first major public heritage project — and a spatial design that uses the extraordinary architecture of the Bijloke monastery to create one of the most immersive museum experiences in Belgium.

What the Exhibition Contains: 150 Years of Football History Told Through Objects

The scale of the research behind Offside is remarkable. In the two years of preparation, the curators uncovered never-before-told stories and rare or presumed-lost objects from Ghent's local football world. The result is an exhibition that works simultaneously as sports history, social history, urban history, and emotional experience.

The Main Themes

150 years of local football in Ghent:

The promenade at the centre of the exhibition tells the story of a city and its clubs — not just the professional clubs, but the café teams, factory teams, neighbourhood teams, women's teams, LGBTQIA+ teams, teams for deaf players, and the hundreds of clubs that have left their mark on Ghent's urban landscape and then disappeared. The spatial analysis of all 1,400 clubs and their pitches reveals football's extraordinary imprint on how the city was built, where communities formed, and how neighbourhoods developed across 150 years.

KAA Gent — 125 Years of Professional Football:

The professional club's history fills a significant part of the exhibition, bringing together rare shirts, unique team photographs, and compelling images. The materials include objects from the club's earliest years, from the 1950s heroes, from the decades of struggle and near-miss, and from the iconic 2015 Belgian championship title — the first and only title in the club's history, a moment that stopped the city in its collective tracks.

Racing Gent (KRC Gent) — The Oldest Club:

Racing Gent, founded in 1899 and the oldest still-existing football club in Ghent, receives the tribute it deserves. Their century-and-a-quarter of history — largely lived in the shadow of KAA Gent's greater resources and profile — is given full, respectful, detailed treatment.

Ghent Fémina and Women's Football:

One of the most powerful and least-known stories in Belgian football history is the story of Ghent Fémina Club — the women's club that became Belgium's first women's league champions in 1927 and then was forced into the shadows when the Belgian Football Association officially banned women's football from 1923 to 1971. That near-50-year ban is one of the great untold scandals of Belgian sporting history, and Offside gives it the serious, critical, emotionally engaged treatment it demands. The story of women's football in Ghent — how it persisted despite the official ban, how it eventually returned, and where it stands today — is one of the exhibition's most resonant threads.

Football, Migration, and the City:

Ghent's football history is inseparable from its immigration history. Working-class neighbourhoods built clubs. Immigrant communities formed teams. The exhibition traces the link between football and migration with specificity and care, using the clubs as a lens onto the waves of population movement that shaped the city across 150 years.

Supporters' Culture:

Football is nothing without the people who show up for it. The exhibition gives dedicated space to supporter culture — the scarves, the songs, the identities built around clubs, the fierce loyalty that turns a Saturday afternoon game into something that matters in a way that is very hard to explain to anyone who hasn't felt it.

Kevin De Bruyne's Childhood Bedroom

Among the hundreds of objects in the exhibition, one installation has generated particular attention and emotion: the reconstructed childhood bedroom of Kevin De Bruyne — arguably the greatest Belgian footballer ever and certainly one of the greatest midfielders of his generation.

De Bruyne grew up in Drongen, a village on the western outskirts of Ghent. His connection to the city is real and meaningful. The reconstruction of his childhood bedroom — the posters on the walls, the football kit folded on the bed, the ordinary domestic setting from which an extraordinary career grew — is one of those exhibition moments that does something more than show you an object. It connects an abstract public figure to a specific human childhood, and it connects that childhood to the city that shaped him.

"Zelfs KDB doet mee" — "Even KDB is involved" — was the headline on the official city press release. That the man who is currently one of the most recognisable athletes on earth contributed materials and cooperation to a local museum exhibition about his city's football history says something both about the man and about what this exhibition means.

The Spatial Design: A Football Pitch in a Medieval Monastery

The exhibition's design — created by Pièce Montée — is built around a football spatial metaphor that uses the STAM's extraordinary architecture with remarkable intelligence.

The design creates three zones:

• The Centre Court — the heart of the exhibition, like the pitch itself, where the main narrative unfolds
• The Promenade — a walk around the perimeter, addressing different themes over the full 150 years of Ghent's football history
• The Stands — the rooms in the monastery wings transformed into seating stands, complete with box areas, where visitors can step into the world of professional football and sit inside the stories of KAA Gent, Racing Gent, and Ghent Fémina Club

The Bijloke monastery — the medieval complex that forms the core of the STAM building — provides stone walls, vaulted ceilings, and corridors of a quality and age that turn the football objects inside them into something more than memorabilia. A 1920s jersey in a medieval monastery becomes an artefact of real cultural weight.

STAM Ghent: One of Belgium's Most Extraordinary Museums

The STAM — Stadsmuseum Gent (Ghent City Museum) at Bijlokesite, Godshuizenlaan 2, 9000 Ghent is one of the most intelligently designed and beautifully located museums in Belgium. The complex combines the medieval Bijloke Abbey — founded in the 13th century — with a contemporary extension by the architectural firm Robbrecht en Daem, creating a dialogue between medieval stone and modern glass that gives the whole complex a quality that very few museums anywhere in the world can match.

The permanent exhibition, "The Story of Ghent," takes visitors from the city's earliest history through its medieval commercial peak as one of the great cloth-trading cities of Europe, through industrialisation, social movements, and into the present. It is one of the finest city history exhibitions in Europe.

Adding Offside to this context — using the medieval monastery as the backdrop for 150 years of football history — creates an experience where the sport's deep roots in working-class and community life find a setting that gives them the cultural weight they deserve.

Practical Information for Your Visit

• Address: STAM, Bijlokesite, Godshuizenlaan 2, 9000 Ghent
• Tickets: €14 basic price; CityCard holders receive a discount; young supporters of KAA Gent receive a specific discount — check details at stamgent.be
• Gallery Languages: Dutch, French, and English
• Accessibility: Fully accessible by public transport from the city centre; approximately 10 minutes on foot from Sint-Baafsplein; tram lines connect to the Bijlokesite
• Online tickets: stamgent.be

Ghent on a Cultural Weekend: Offside in Context

An exhibition at the STAM sits naturally within a broader cultural visit to Ghent. The Bijlokesite itself is located just south of the Graslei and Korenlei quaysides — a 10-minute walk from the medieval waterfront. From the STAM, the Gravensteen Castle is 15 minutes on foot through the old town. The Sint-Baafskathedraal and the Ghent Altarpiece are 10 minutes away.

Combining the Offside exhibition with the permanent Story of Ghent, a walk along the medieval quaysides, a lunch in the Patershol neighbourhood, and an afternoon visit to the Gravensteen is one of the finest single-day cultural itineraries available in Belgium — and entirely achievable.

For football fans visiting from across Belgium, the Netherlands, France, or Germany, the combination of Offside at the STAM and a KAA Gent home match at the Ghelamco Arena (a 20-minute tram ride from the city centre) makes for an extraordinary football-culture weekend.

An Exhibition That Gives Football the Cultural Respect It Has Always Deserved

For too long, football has been treated as separate from "serious" culture — as popular entertainment rather than the deep social and urban phenomenon it actually is. Offside – Football in the City does something important: it takes the sport seriously as history, as sociology, as community experience, and as the carrier of stories — about migration, about gender, about working-class identity, about what it means to belong to a city — that deserve to be told carefully and with full respect.

It runs until 26 May 2026. The museum is open to all, and the gallery texts are in English. Whether you are a KAA Gent supporter, a football history enthusiast, a visitor to Ghent curious about what makes the city, or someone who has never cared much for football but cares deeply about human stories — this exhibition has something genuine to say to you.

Book your ticket at stamgent.be and let 150 years of football, the city, and everything they carried with them take you somewhere you didn't expect to go.

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