The Grand Place was packed, a sea of red shirts. The Belgium squad waved down from the balcony of Brussels' City Hall, celebrating their third-place finish in the 2018 FIFA World Cup. It felt like the entire country (population: 11 million) was packed into the square. "It's a difficult environment, sometimes, but the moment we did something like that, everybody's together," Kevin de Bruyne told ESPN.
The Belgium squad was packed with global superstars such as De Bruyne, Eden Hazard, Romelu Lukaku and Thibaut Courtois. They'd gone further in a World Cup than any other group from that small, European country before them.