In Belgian football, the first image that came back to the evocation of David Vandenbroeck was that of a tough defender, quite hard on the man. After playing for Tubize, Charleroi, Kortrijk, Zulte-Waregem, Antwerp and Louvain, the native of Braine-l’Alleud signed for Luxembourg in 2016.

It is now as a young coach that he returns. If he is not one of the most publicized names, David Vandenbroeck is also part of this new generation of Belgian coaches. At 39, he is coming out of his first experience as a coach at FC Wiltz, in the Luxembourg first division. After stopping his playing career overnight to take charge of the team. It has been a week since the collaboration ended, by mutual agreement with management after a complicated start to the season. The opportunity for him to draw a first assessment.

“As a young coach, when you don’t yet have a well-defined method, you often have to wait until the second experience, or at least finish the first, to know exactly what kind of coach you want to be. By the time the collaboration with Wiltz stopped, I think that almost at the second, I knew what kind of coach I wanted to be, how I wanted to lead the boat and what tools I was going to use to be able to do it” he explains to us.

This transition to Wiltz forged it: “I think that to be able to have an identity as a coach, you clearly have to go through experiences like this. It’s really the best training in a championship despite everything tough, in which there are European places which are distributed at the end of the year Not to mention that we had to deal with the smallest budget of the elite. READ FULL STORY HERE>>>CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING>>>

Towards a return to Belgium?

David Vandenbroeck is in any case eager to get back on track: “I’m leaving there with 35 months of experience and a desire to continue to develop my ideas, to continue working in the field with a new group. I would like to find a project fairly quickly, I remain open to different proposals, to different projects. I received proposals in Luxembourg to continue there. I did not find it uninteresting, far from it, I listened to the project. but I couldn’t see myself going back there for a tour, without any pretension.”

A new challenge on the Belgian lawns would not displease the Brainois: “It is also one of the reasons which pushed me not to follow up on one of the new projects that was proposed to me at the Luxembourg. Coming back to Belgium, where I spent most of my career, is clearly a goal. There is this atmosphere in Belgium which is lost a little in Luxembourg. I felt it from the first matches. I went back to Belgium to see it. It’s something exhilarating.”

With a few avenues already in the sights? “I’ve already had one or the other contact, yes. Even during the summer transfer window. It didn’t happen because I was loyal to Wiltz’s project.” For now, David Vandenbroeck focuses on his non-football profession. He works as a freelancer in the healthcare field.

But this is not incompatible with a position of head coach, on the contrary. He already took on this double role at Wiltz. This did not prevent him from making the round trip from his home in Namur to Luxembourg five times: “This must be taken into account, but it should not represent a hindrance in my decision. What I am going to see , it is above all the initial project which must be interesting, in which I must be able to recognize myself, the discussions which I will have with the managers”.

Eight years after his departure from Belgian football, he therefore keeps all doors open: “From my 35 months of coaching, despite this accelerated training, I am not a pretentious person. In the long term, or if a project comes along now in the professional world, obviously it will interest me, that’s where I have evolved for almost my entire career. But the intermediate stages are also important to improve your experience, your coaching, your training. D1 ACFF also interests me a lot.”