Football Season Guide

After the great success from two years ago and the first presence in Europe in nearly 20 years Cercle Brugge slumped into mediocrity last season. Poor campaign, three managerial changes and lack of goals once the 2023/24 Golden Boot winner Denkey was sold very nearly led to relegation. Cercle finished the regular season in the bottom 4 and then narrowly avoided direct relegation. Still had to face Patro Eisden in the survival play-off but 8:2 aggregate win in these matches calmed things. Naturally the managerial roulette continued. De Wulf, appointed only in April, was sacked after the season. Onur Cinel, assistant coach of RB Salzburg last year, is now in charge. He is a progressive young manager that spent the last 5 years at Salzburg mainly developing young talent. Managed to avoid relegation largely thanks to the late-season contributions from their captain Thibo Somers. He was sold this summer though and his departure will be felt. Promising striker Augusto also left, which means that the only typical centre forward is the January signing Steve Ngoura. The 20-year-old has a lot to prove as Cercle paid a huge fee for his services and he hardly played last spring due to injury issues. Clearly, more bodies are needed in attack. Most of the new signings are very young players. It seems the new manager doesn’t mind high volume of inexperienced players, with his hope being that he can develop at least some of them into regular starters. This was Cinel’s biggest gift while at Salzburg, so if he can do that in Brugge too Cercle could do much better than expected.