The Belgian Football Association scores online with a new website made by The Reference

Football fans in Belgium and around the world can now enjoy the new website of the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA). BelgianFootball.be was created by The Reference, a Ghent-based full-service digital agency, and part of the Emakina Group.

A site to experience today’s football

The Royal Belgian Football Association exists since 1895 and represents all football clubs in Belgium. Each football season, the Association organises no less than 300,000 football matches for 2000 teams. Its ambassadors, the Red Devils, represent it internationally, attracting a lot of web attention. The Belgian Football Association has been active on the web for many years with the site footbel.com (included in the CIM Metriweb reports). Players, from the highest to the lowest leagues, and their supporters, use this site extensively. But they’re not alone. The site is also commonly used by referees, trainers, clubs, board members, stewards and volunteers, sponsors etc. A match is a lot more than 22 players on a field running behind a ball… As a full-service digital agency, The Reference convinced the Association of their web approach in synchronicity with the further professional development of the sport in Belgium.

Caught the football bug? Build your own website!

The project posed some interesting challenges. The new RBFA website had to accommodate large traffic volumes, while delivering massive amounts of information to the entire football community.  Thanks to the smooth integration with the RBFA’s databases and its existing backend, you are a click away from all information on teams, upcoming matches, and more!

To make the web experience fun and user friendly, the site features a dashboard, where visitors can create their own pages. Each of them can pick her or his favourite team, be alerted of cancelled matches, view filtered news items, and enjoy many other personalisation features.

The new site was built using Drupal 6, with an extensive system of dynamic blocks. Content editors can thus create and adapt information efficiently and with high flexibility, significantly reducing the time laps needed for information to be published.

Anja Cappelle, managing director van The Reference concludes: ‘We are very proud to have created this very lively information channel for the Belgian football fans and their Association’.