BRUGES, Belgium — Leicester City’s fans gathered in the shadows of dreaming spires and sang. They thronged the cobbled streets by the thousands. They hung their flags from the gingerbread facades of delicate redbrick buildings, the storybook backdrop to the next chapter of their fairy tale.
A meeting with Club Brugge, of course, was hardly the sort of achingly glamorous meeting Leicester had craved for the club’s first-ever game in the Champions League. Plenty of those traveling supporters might have envisaged their team taking on Barcelona or Real Madrid, one of the aristocrats, instead of the Belgian champion — a club of stolidly proletarian mien housed in an unlovable concrete monolith of a stadium.