FC AarauIn September 1993, a few months after winning the Swiss championship, FC Aarau faced AC Milan in the first round of the Champions League. The champions of Switzerland lost 1–0 at home and held the Italians to a 0–0 draw away, going out with a one-goal aggregate deficit. For a club from a town of modest size, it was the high point of a decade in which Aarau, under the coach Rolf Fringer, won its third and last league title, after those of 1912 and 1914.
The club was formed on 26 May 1902 by workers of a local brewery, in Aarau, the capital of the canton of Aargau. Its early success was rapid: Aarau were Swiss champions in 1912 and again in 1914. After that, nearly eight decades passed before the third title. In the meantime the club became known for its home, the Stadion Brügglifeld, where it has played since 1924. The ground celebrated its 100th anniversary on 12 October 2024 with a match against Schalke 04, and it has changed little over the years, apart from the main stand, which dates from 1982. It holds about 8,000 spectators, and a cup tie against Luzern drew a sold-out crowd of 8,450, which is considered a big attendance for the stadium.
The 1980s brought the other major trophy. In 1985, under the coach Ottmar Hitzfeld, Aarau won the Swiss Cup, which remains its only victory in the competition. The club had finished as runner-up in 1930 and did so again in 1989. The cup win gave it a place in the 1985–86 Cup Winners' Cup, where it lost the first-round tie to Crvena Zvezda 2–4 on aggregate, with a 0–2 defeat away and a 2–2 draw at home. Aarau played in the UEFA Cup first round in 1988–89, and in 1994 it passed a qualifying round against Mura of Slovenia, winning both legs 1–0.
From 1981 until 2010 the club was an uninterrupted member of the Swiss top flight, so persistent that fans called it the unrelegatable club. That run ended with relegation in 2010. Aarau returned to the Super League in 2013, but went down again in 2015, and since then the club has often fallen short in its attempts to come back, once in a dramatic relegation play-off against Xamax. In place of the old nickname, supporters have begun to speak of an unpromotable club, although the stadium keeps filling for the big matches, and in 2025–26 the team finished second in the Challenge League.
The present-day identity of the club, which plays in red and white, rests on this contrast. Aarau's honours are modest in number, three championships and one cup, but they cover a period of more than a century, and the 1993 season, when a small-town club reached the Champions League, still defines how the supporters see the team. In 1985 and in 1993 the club was led by two coaches, Hitzfeld and Fringer, who later became better known elsewhere, and the memory of those years is one of the club's main assets. The Brügglifeld, a plain and old-fashioned ground, remains for many Swiss football followers a place that recalls a different era of the game.