Three days after a wayward shot from a public viewing screen on the Rond-Point Schuman sent an official FIFA match ball careering through the east façade of the Berlaymont, the European Commission has formally condemned its own headquarters and referred the matter to the Council “for urgent structural and spiritual guidance.”
The ball, an Adidas Al Rihla believed to have been struck by a member of the public named only as “Karel, from Ghent,” remains exactly where it landed: embedded in the glass curtain wall of the 13th floor, between the office of the Commissioner for Transport and a printer that no one uses.
“We have been assured by engineers that the ball is, in fact, holding the building up,” Chief Commission Spokesperson Anitta Harting told a packed midday briefing. “Removing it is therefore not, at this time, an option we are entertaining.”
A delicate jurisdictional question
The incident has opened a bureaucratic wrangle of unusual complexity. The Berlaymont is Belgian soil, houses an EU institution, was struck by a FIFA-regulated ball, and is insured through a Luxembourg-based underwriter that has described the claim as “a first in the history of risk.”
Complicating matters further, the Commission’s own internal services directive classifies any projectile entering the building as “an incoming document,” meaning the ball must, by procedure, be logged, translated into the 24 official languages, and referred to the relevant directorate-general before it can be removed.
The building’s 3,000-odd civil servants have been told to work from home indefinitely, a move several of them described as “the single greatest piece of news I have ever received at work.”
Karel, from Ghent, is “sorry but not that sorry”
The man responsible for the kick, a 34-year-old logistics coordinator who asked to be identified only as Karel, told this newspaper he had been aiming for a small gap between two bollards.
“I misjudged the wind,” he said. “The ball carried. I heard glass. Then I heard sirens. Then I heard a spokesman refer to my football as an incoming document, and I went home.”
Karel has not been charged. The Belgian federal police, asked whether they intended to prosecute, issued a statement saying they had “reviewed the footage and concluded that the strike was, on balance, a belter,” and that it would be “churlish” to pursue the matter further.
As of press time, the ball had not moved. The Council has scheduled an emergency conclave for Thursday. Engineers have asked that no one, under any circumstances, attempt to head it back out.