Well, last season we finished 'only' 3rd. We were comfortably second, but in Belgium there was a play off system since last season that halves your points after 30 league games (for the first time there were only 16 teams in competition, instead of the usual 18). After 30 games the top 6 plays play off and their points are divided by 2. If this didn't happen, we were second and played Champions League, but now we lost (dramatically with 6-2 against our rivals) on the last match in play off against Gent who then ended 2nd. On the other hand, it was thanks to the play off we could still win the title, but Anderlecht was too strong, and Brugge totally lost control in the play off with only 3 wins.
Next season we will try to challenge for the title again, but Anderlecht are still strong, although 2 top players left or are about to leave (Van Damme to Wolves and Boussoufa normally to Aston Villa).
In Bruges, Sonck (striker) leaves transfer free, Alcaraz too (to Wigan). Maybe some rest overs will leave but that's not bad. Until today there are no incoming transfers, but it looks like Marcos is coming over from rivals Standard Liège (he's a right back, the biggest pain point in Bruges since 5 years) and there is certainly a striker coming, but we don't know much about that yet.
My favourite players at the moment are Carl Hoefkens (central defender, 31 years and a strong brick in defence, played in England too), Vadis Odjija-Ofoe (defensive midfield, came over from Hamburg last year, a young Belgian talent) and Jonathan Blondel (left/central midfield, aggressive player, sometimes too aggressive unfortunately).
In May 2008 my favourite striker (François Sterchélé) in Bruges died in a car accident, that was a very emotional period. He was very popular in the whole country, was league top scorer before he came to Bruges and would have made it to the European subtop, but unfortunately that 8th May decided otherwise, that was a depressive day at work as he died at night.
There are no really young talents that are ready for the first team, that's a bit of a pain point here too. Anderlecht have a 16-year old striker who was topscorer in the league last season, we should need something like that too...
Our coach is Adrie Koster, a Duchtman. He signed last year and came over from the Ajax youngsters squad. He's a good coach who thinks very offensive (very rare in Belgium) but should get better in defensive tactics as we get a lot of goals against us.
In Europe we were in the group stage along with Partizan Belgrado, FC Toulouse and Shakhtar Donetsk. We lost 1-4 to Shakhtar at home (much too strong), and played 0-0 in Donetsk, in Toulouse it was 2-2 and at home we won 1-0, in Partizan we won 2-4 and at home we won 2-0. In the 1/16th finals we won 1-0 at home to Valencia, but we lost in Valencia 3-0 after relegations. But there was no reason to be ashamed for that.
Next season we play 1 preliminary round in the Europa League so we hope to qualify for the group stage again.
There were some Danish players in Bruges too: Ulrik Le Fèvre, Kenneth Brylle, Birger Jensen, Jan Sorensen, Anders Nielsen, Brian Priske (I might forget some).
More questions? Just shoot :-)