Ed Still Faces Dismissal After Missed Penalties at RAAL La Louvière
Ed Still’s brutal year continues. Two jobs gone in a matter of months, the latest after a 1-0 defeat to Cercle Brugge in which his RAAL La Louvière side missed not one but two penalties.
He walks away with another dismissal on his CV, but this one comes with a fair dose of frustration attached.
Two missed penalties, one fallen coach
At the weekend, RAAL faced fellow strugglers Cercle Brugge in what already felt like a six-pointer. They created the moments that should have swung it. Twice they stood over the spot. Twice they failed to score.
The margin for error at the bottom is tiny. For Still, it vanished completely.
Chairman Salvatore Curaba did not point to those missed chances or to one bad afternoon. He pointed to age. He wants a more experienced head coach, arguing that the current staff were too young for the fight that awaits this season. Still, once again, is the one paying the price.
A pattern of bad timing and bad fits
Losing the Watford job has become almost a rite of passage for modern coaches, and Still’s brief spell in England followed the familiar script. He arrived, he tried to steady a restless club, he left. Few thrive there; even fewer are given the time to try.
What has followed since his early success at Charleroi has been a sequence of awkward landings and unstable projects rather than a clean shot at building something.
At Eupen, he came in late to rescue a poor Pandas side and did exactly that, keeping them in the league. He was not rewarded with a proper summer to reshape a tired squad. The club went down the following season, with Still already gone and his work quickly forgotten in the relegation post-mortem.
Then came Kortrijk. Another late arrival, another squad handed to him in pieces. The club had spent most of the summer in takeover talks, transfer business frozen while new ownership was discussed and then collapsed. Only then did they turn to Still, with the season about to start and barely any fresh blood added.
He did not win a game there. On paper, that sticks. In reality, many coaches would have sunk in the same storm.
From thin squads to a bloated one
This summer, after Watford, Still chose RAAL La Louvière. If Kortrijk had left him short of players, RAAL went the other way entirely.
They were one of the most aggressive operators in the market, flooding the dressing room with new faces. Fifteen signings. Multiple options for almost every position. What looked ambitious on paper quickly became a different kind of headache: a bloated squad, little continuity, and a coach asked to make sense of it all in a matter of weeks.
The start offered hope. For a club widely tipped to struggle, RAAL opened the campaign with encouraging signs. Yet as autumn wore on, the table told a harsher story. Still leaves with three wins, one draw and eight defeats, the club sitting 17th and already plotting another reset.
Curaba wants more players again in January, this time for a “more experienced” coach. With 15 already through the door in the summer, departures feel inevitable. Another churn, another rebuild, another man tasked with fast-forwarding cohesion.
Could Still have done better? Possibly. But asking any coach to judge, blend and balance 15 new arrivals in a few months, while fighting at the wrong end of the table, is a high-wire act with no safety net.
What next for Still?
This latest dismissal will not help his chances of landing another Pro League job. Football directors look at the bare numbers, the sackings, the winless runs, and often stop there.
Yet Still’s reputation as an assistant remains strong. His work with Lens and Anderlecht showed a different side: detailed, diligent, and valuable within a broader staff. In that role, without the political crossfire and the revolving-door panic of struggling clubs, he has already proved he can add something.
Head coach opportunities at the top level may now dry up for a while. The dugout, though, is rarely a straight line. The next move he makes – and crucially, the next project he chooses – will decide whether this season becomes a permanent label or just the roughest chapter in a career still being written.
