Paul Van Himst

He was sixteen years old when Anderlecht put him in the first team, seventeen when he won his first Belgian championship, and eighteen when the national team capped him. By twenty he was already the best footballer his country had ever produced, and he would remain so, uncontested, for the next four decades — until a generation of Belgians who had never seen him play began to argue about someone else. Paul Van Himst carried that status from adolescence to retirement without ever visibly buckling under it, which may be the most unusual thing about him. Born in Sint-Pieters-Leeuw, outside Brussels, in 1943, Van Himst was a forward of exceptional technical refinement in a football culture that had produced very little of it. He operated as a second striker or attacking midfielder, dropping between the lines to receive, and his qualities were touch, balance and vision rather than pace or power — at 1.74m he was slight, and he survived on the ability to move the ball before contact arrived. He was a precise finisher with both feet, an outstanding passer in tight areas, and unusually generous for a player of his standing, creating as often as he scored. He spent sixteen seasons at RSC Anderlecht, from 1959 to 1975, scoring 233 goals in 457 matches and winning eight Belgian championships and four Belgian Cups, and he was named Belgian Footballer of the Year four times. His European reputation was built on individual performances rather than trophies, since Anderlecht of that era consistently reached the latter stages of continental competition without winning it. He collected 81 caps and 30 goals for Belgium, captained the side to third place at the 1972 European Championship — the country's best result of the century — and finished eighth in the 1965 Ballon d'Or voting, then the highest position ever achieved by a Belgian. His career carried a structural frustration he never escaped. Van Himst played almost his entire prime in a Belgian league far below the level of his ability, and although Milan and other clubs pursued him, he stayed, which cost him the European stage his talent warranted. Physically he was easy to intimidate: aggressive man-marking disrupted him more than it did contemporaries of similar quality, and against defences that fouled him early and repeatedly he could be reduced to peripheral involvement. He offered nothing defensively, and Belgium's failure to qualify for a World Cup between 1954 and 1970 meant that the world barely saw him at the age when he was at his best. None of it produced bitterness, which in a player of his gifts was remarkable. Van Himst was modest, courteous and almost unnaturally even-tempered, a man whose behaviour at thirty-two was indistinguishable from his behaviour at eighteen despite two decades of national adoration. He did not argue with referees, rarely retaliated against defenders who kicked him throughout matches, and was cautioned only occasionally in a career of sustained physical provocation — his response to being fouled was to get up and ask for the ball again. He captained Anderlecht and Belgium by example and by consistency rather than instruction, and teammates uniformly described a leader who never made a teammate feel diminished. He was reserved with the press, uncomfortable with the celebrity his country pressed on him, and entirely without vanity about his own status. Away from the pitch his life was conventional and stable: family, no scandal, no nightlife, no controversy across a public career spanning fifty years including his later work as a coach and pundit. His fame in Belgium was such that he appeared as himself alongside Pelé and Bobby Moore in the film Escape to Victory, an incongruous footnote for a man who spent his whole life avoiding attention. Gifted, gracious and improbably unspoiled, Van Himst was a great player who never once behaved like one.