"In the summer of 2012, Kevin told me that he had an affair with my old best friend," Caroline Lijnen said, drawing a line through a relationship that began in 2010. She says the relationship never recovered; a year later she travelled to Madrid, met Thibaut Courtois and, she says, "that evening, Thibaut offered me what I had not received during a three-year relationship with Kevin. With Thibaut, I could talk about anything and everything and he had even prepared me a delicious meal. Kevin never did it for me."
The episode resurfaced publicly in 2014 after Kevin De Bruyne wrote about it in his autobiography Keep It Simple, and it became one of Belgian football's most talked-about off-field incidents just as the country's Golden Generation was finding form. The personal row spilled into the national camp: then-coach Marc Wilmots asked De Bruyne whether he wanted Courtois removed from the squad because of the conflict, but De Bruyne declined, choosing the team's interests over expulsion.
That decision left a clear mark. The verified timeline is simple: De Bruyne and Lijnen began dating in 2010 and remained together for three years; in the summer of 2012 De Bruyne told Lijnen about the affair; in 2013 Lijnen met Courtois in Madrid while he was on loan at Atlético Madrid; and the episode became public in 2014 after De Bruyne's book. The result was internal tension at a moment Belgium was building toward real international promise.
The friction has an odd afterlife. Courtois, by then established at Real Madrid, publicly praised De Bruyne on the Rio Ferdinand Presents podcast in 2025, calling him "a guy with a lot of talent, but also very hardworking." That compliment landed differently because the earlier controversy had once threatened to divide the squad. The basic fact—that a personal dispute involved three of Belgium's highest-profile figures—did not disappear simply because both players kept being picked.
Lijnen has been frank about motives and choices. She told reporters she gave De Bruyne "the choice: her or me. I was ready to give him another chance, but our relationship was never the same afterwards." She also offered an unvarnished explanation for her own actions: "Kevin had deceived me and I thought, 'Why shouldn't I do that too?'" Those lines explain why a private break became a public issue: the people at its center were teammates, national-team figures whose personal fallout mattered to selection and morale.
The practical weight of the story is straightforward. Wilmots confronted the problem at the team level; De Bruyne refused to push for disciplinary measures against Courtois; both men remained central figures as Belgium entered the 2026 FIFA World Cup—De Bruyne now at SSC Napoli, Courtois at Real Madrid. That shared selection is evidence that, institutionally, Belgian staff and the players themselves prioritized performance and continuity over purging interpersonal conflict.
What the record does not fully show is how those choices translated into day-to-day relationships inside the camp. Courtois's 2025 praise for De Bruyne points to at least a public-facing professionalism. De Bruyne's decision in 2014 to keep Courtois available for selection points to a private restraint. The most consequential unanswered question for Belgium's 2026 campaign is whether that professionalism has genuinely healed the personal fractures or merely papered them over—because in knockout tournaments, locker-room cohesion can be as decisive as tactics.
