FC Thun

FC Thun was founded on 1 May 1898 by a group of football enthusiasts who met at the Gasthof Zum Sternen, at the corner of Marktgasse and Schwäbisstrasse in Thun. The club adopted red and white as its colours and spent its early decades working through the ranks of amateur football, from the Central Swiss League through the 2.Liga from 1933, before a league restructuring in 1944 moved the side into the 1.Liga. The club's first-ever promotion to the top flight, the Nationalliga A, came in the 1953/54 season after finishing runner-up to Lugano, but the stay lasted only a single campaign before relegation followed.

It took 47 years for FC Thun to return to the top division, finally achieved under coach Hanspeter Latour, who guided the club back to the Nationalliga A in 2001/02. A few seasons later came the brightest chapter of the club's pre-2025 history: the run to the UEFA Champions League group stage in 2005/06, featuring current head coach Mauro Lustrinelli as the team's striker, Nelson Ferreira scoring in the memorable match against Arsenal, and Andres Gerber, today the club's chairman, wearing the captain's armband.

FC Thun play their home matches at the 10,000-capacity Stockhorn Arena. The club has twice reached the Swiss Cup final, losing in 1955 and 2019, and in 2025/26 it crowned more than a century of steady, community-rooted development with its first Swiss championship.

FC Thun sensationally crowned Swiss champions – the underdog fairy tale becomes reality

The footballing sensation of the 2025/2026 season has an address: Stockhorn Arena in Thun. The club, which was playing in the second division just a year earlier, has claimed the first Swiss championship title in its 128-year history.

FC Thun's road to the title reads like a movie script. The team finished the 2024/2025 season with an eleven-point lead at the top of the Challenge League, the second tier of Swiss football, earning promotion to the Super League. Yet no one expected the newly promoted side to immediately contend for the top prize — instead, the team led by Mauro Lustrinelli held the top spot in the table for most of the season.

The title was decided on the final weekend of the season. Thun lost away to FC Basel, but a day later their closest title rival, St. Gallen, also suffered defeat, which ultimately sealed the historic triumph for the club from the shores of Lake Thun.

This isn't the first time the club has come close to major success — FCT's closest brush with the title came in 2005, when it finished as runner-up in the Swiss championship, and the club also has two domestic cups in its trophy cabinet. This time, however, it broke the long-standing dominance of three clubs — Basel, Zurich, and Young Boys Bern, who had shared the titles between them for the previous 22 seasons.

The achievement is being compared to Leicester City's fairy-tale Premier League triumph in 2016 — the difference being that this time the hero is a club from Switzerland's eleventh-largest city, picturesquely nestled at the foot of the Alps.