Sometimes small villages reach very high football levels. Olympia Wijgmaal is one of those teams. Wijgmaal is a small village in the Leuven area and we bet no-one in Wijgmaal would have ever expected this team to go that far in the national divisions.
Especially not pastor Van Hees when he started a football team during WWI in Wijgmaal. In full occupation time he wanted to give the youth a chance to entertainment and the team joined the Catholic FA. Unfortunately when Van Hees went away the football tradition came to a stop. It would take until 1926 when Wijgmaal would see a team again. That was the year when Olympia Sporting Club Wijgmaal was founded and two years later they also joined the Belgian FA.
Before WWII the team would only play in the regional leagues, but already steadily climbing up. Just before WWII began they promoted to the top regional league. During the 50s Olympia mostly went up and down between the second and third regional league, but once the 60s began Olympia had successes again. In 1965 for instance they reached the national divisions for the very first time. Two years later they even managed to go to third division, albeit for two years only.
Across the 70s and 80s Olympia would become a solid team in fourth division and in 1986 they decided to take over (or merge as you may want to call it) with Sportkring Delle. That team was founded in 1944 but only played in the lower regional leagues. Nothing changed to the team and they continued playing like before. In 1990 however they relegated for a brief period to the regional leagues again after a couple of steady decades in the national divisions.
In 2006 Olympia managed to return to the national divisions and up until now they still play there. In 2011/12 they had one season in third division again and now they are playing in the second amateur league.
Recently (2017) they had signed Tom Soetaers as their head coach, but in the early days of 2018 Tom Soetaers was released and Rocky Peeters (whom had played for the team in 2016 as well) took over the position of head coach.
The stadium is very charming, with some nice little oldschool features. The grandstand is an absolute eyecatcher. Unfortunately they are playing on a 3G pitch. But don't let that stop you to visit this lovely team near Leuven.