Football in Switzerland

Football is the most popular sport in Switzerland. Approximately 65% of the people in Switzerland are interested in football.

The Swiss Football Association was formed in 1895 and was a founder member of the sport's international governing body FIFA in 1904. The Swiss cities of Zürich and Nyon are home to FIFA and the European governing body UEFA respectively. The country played host to the 1954 World Cup and 2008 European Championship.

Switzerland has an extensive league system, with the Swiss Super League as the country's premier men's competition. There are also several cup competitions, most notably the national Swiss Cup.

The Swiss national team participated in the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany and were narrowly beaten by Ukraine on penalties in the round of 16. Switzerland co-hosted the UEFA Euro 2008 tournament together with Austria. They were eliminated in the group stage, although they did record a win against Portugal. The best international result was in 1954 when Switzerland, as the host, reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup. They also reached the World Cup quarter-finals in 1934, 1938 and 2026.

History

Early development (1850s-1900) The first football matches, played in various forms, are documented in Switzerland from the 1850s-1860s on the shores of Lake Geneva. Some sources even testify to the existence of similar activities in Geneva in the first half of the 19th century. The main vectors of cultural transfer from Great Britain were boarding schools inspired by English public schools, with international teaching staff and students, British students and businessmen established in Switzerland, and Swiss people educated in schools across the English Channel.

The first football club in Switzerland was the Lausanne Football and Cricket Club, founded in 1860 by English students. It was also the first football club created outside of England. Several other clubs, with a majority of Anglo-Saxon players, emerged in the 1870s. From the 1880s, the sport entered physical education programs for primary and secondary school boys, though it faced decades of resistance from pedagogical circles. In cities, the number of new teams (often short-lived) increased. In 1895, 12 clubs founded the Swiss Football Association.

The first unofficial Swiss championship was won in 1898 by Grasshopper Club Zürich. The following year, the Anglo-American Club Zürich, composed mainly of Anglo-Saxon chemistry students from the Federal Polytechnic School, won the first official title. At the turn of the century, the first signs of supporter culture appeared, such as team-colored lanterns and victory celebrations. Only a few hundred people attended championship matches and a few thousand watched final phase encounters.

The first matches of a Swiss selection (composed mainly of foreign players) against teams from neighboring countries were organized from 1897, with the national team playing its first official international match in 1905. Some clubs also participated in international encounters and tournaments abroad, such as FC Winterthur (1909) and FC Zürich (1911) at the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy in Turin.

Switzerland was a crossroads for football's spread: Swiss club founders and foreign pioneers who had discovered the sport in Swiss schools contributed to its propagation in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Russia, southeastern Europe, North Africa, and Brazil. Hans Gamper from Winterthur founded FC Barcelona (1899), and Walther Bensemann, who had attended school in Montreux, was behind several German clubs and the football magazine Kicker (1920).

In 1904, Switzerland co-founded FIFA with six other continental European countries. FIFA's headquarters has been in Zurich since 1932, and it has been led by Swiss presidents since 1998 (Sepp Blatter, 1998-2015; Gianni Infantino from 2016). Switzerland also participated in creating UEFA in 1954 in Basel. UEFA's headquarters was in Bern from 1959 before moving to Nyon in 1995. Swiss Gustav Wiederkehr served as UEFA president from 1962 to 1972.

Expansion and growth (1900-1945) A geographical and social expansion of men's football began early in Switzerland. After the turn of the century, teams also emerged in rural regions. While the ASF had 26 clubs in 1902, it already had 115 in 1914, with about 15,000 members. Until 1918, almost all regions of the country were represented in the first division championship, except for southern and southeastern Switzerland (FC Chiasso was part of the Italian first category from 1914-1915).

Originally practiced mainly by merchants and university graduates, football then spread among men of other social classes and, from around 1900, also within the working class. Several matches were played during the 1914 Swiss National Exhibition. During World War I, national and international competitions continued, and football was integrated into army activities.

In the interwar period, male youth was gripped by "football fever" repeatedly criticized by pedagogical circles. Although handball was promoted as an alternative in schools, unorganized football, played by boys in streets, squares, and meadows since the 1880s, gained popularity. The sport's notoriety experienced new growth when Switzerland reached the final of the Olympic tournament in 1924. Organized football also developed: in 1945, the ASFA had 80,000 active players in its ranks.

Competitive activities were also offered by the Swiss Workers' Gymnastics and Sports Federation (Satus), which launched its own championship in 1921, by the Swiss Catholic Gymnastics and Sports Federation, and by the ephemeral communist sports association Rotsport-Verband. Corporate football, after regional beginnings in the interwar period, designated a national champion from 1943 and experienced its peak in the immediate post-war period. Jewish football, represented by football sections of various Jewish gymnastics societies, by FC Hakoah Zürich (founded in 1922), and from 1950 by Swiss selections participating in international tournaments of the Maccabi movement, was integrated into the ASFA.

Simultaneously, football became an element of new mass culture. Its media coverage increased with the emergence of press photography, radio, the Swiss Newsreel, and specialized sports press. Players became advertising vehicles. Twelve stadiums with a capacity of more than 10,000 people each were built between 1922 and 1934. In 1925, the ASFA launched a second national competition, the Swiss Cup (later Swiss Cup). A national league was created in 1931 with sometimes professional players. However, the public was not responsive, and professionalism was criticized by various political and sporting circles. In 1941, due notably to financial problems encountered by clubs, the ASFA completely banned the use of professional footballers.

Switzerland's victory against "Greater Germany" during the 1938 FIFA World Cup, which triggered general euphoria in the country, made football, as a male sport, an element of spiritual defense. Gala matches between the Swiss national team and selections from neighboring countries, as well as an international junior tournament, were organized during the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition. During World War II, activities continued at national and, until 1943, international levels. Matches attracting large audiences opposed selections from military units. Four friendly matches played against Germany in 1941 and 1942, attended by political, military, and diplomatic personalities from both countries, caused a sensation.

Post-war developments (1945-1990) The return to amateurism after 1941, followed by a timid transition to semi-professionalism in the late 1950s, led to the decline of high-level Swiss football on the international scene. The national team nevertheless still achieved good performances during the World Cups in Brazil (1950) and at home (1954). Despite the symbiosis between football and television, which stimulated the sport's commercialization, and the transition to full professionalism in the late 1970s, Switzerland never managed to qualify in the 1970s and 1980s for a final phase of the World Cup or UEFA European Championship.

Even in European competitions reserved for clubs, contested from 1955, Swiss teams were often eliminated very quickly. The only exceptions were the semi-finals reached by BSC Young Boys (1959) and FC Zürich (1964 and 1977) in the European Cup and by Grasshopper Club Zürich (1978) in the UEFA Cup. During these years, attendance at championship matches remained modest and stadium infrastructure became obsolete.

Supporter culture nevertheless continued to develop. British elements, such as chants, appeared around Swiss stadiums, and supporters of various teams organized into fan clubs and support groups. In 1951, disturbances were recorded during the Swiss Cup final. From the late 1960s, the use of pyrotechnic devices became increasingly frequent, as did pitch invasions by the public, which led to the installation of fences around the pitches in the 1970s. The international wave of football hooliganism, sometimes influenced by the far-right, reached Switzerland during the following decade.

The post-war social transformation was also manifested in football through the creation of numerous clubs reflecting the strong immigration that characterized the period of high economic growth. Their founding dates allow tracing the chronology and geographical origin of the different waves of immigration that succeeded each other in Switzerland. This process continued into the 21st century, so that in urban regions nearly a third of clubs were founded by immigrants.

Modern era developments (1990-present) In line with international trends, the commercialization of Swiss men's football experienced a new surge from the 1990s. At the same time, the national team's performances improved. In 1994, Switzerland qualified for the first time since 1966 for a World Cup final phase; from then on, it regularly participated in World Cups and European Championships. Players from immigrant backgrounds were often the architects of these successes and became emblematic of successful integration policy.

Following past examples, some high-level clubs were transformed into joint-stock companies. At the beginning of the 21st century, annual budgets sometimes exceeded 60 million Swiss francs. Simultaneously, economic problems multiplied due to excessive transfer amounts, overly high player salaries, and financial speculation. They culminated with the spectacular bankruptcies of traditional clubs like Servette FC in 2005 and Neuchâtel Xamax in 2012.

Stadium infrastructure was modernized in view of the UEFA Euro 2008 held in Switzerland and Austria. The international culture of ultras supporters, who support their team with elaborate choreographies while criticizing commercialization and the loss of football club identity, also manifested itself on Swiss pitches from the 1990s. At the same time, problems related to hooliganism remained current and reached their peak with violent disturbances in Basel in 2006 and Zurich in 2011, as well as with the scandal caused by antisemitic ultras from FC Luzern in St. Gallen in 2015.

In 2022, the ASF had 325,000 members (including 12% women), making it the largest sports federation in Switzerland. Football's popularity is also attested by the fact that various pressure groups organized outside official structures and were sometimes behind their own international competitions: these include LGBT tournaments played during the EuroGames in Zurich (2000) and Bern (2023), or the Europeada, a football championship for linguistic minorities first organized in 2008 in Grisons.

Women's football