Grasshopper Club ZürichAmong the founders of Grasshopper Club Zürich was Hans Gamper, a local lad who some years later founded FC Barcelona. That detail shows how international the club was from the start, set up on 1 September 1886 by an English student, Tom Griffith, and pupils of Manchester Grammar School. Thanks to a donation of 20 francs the team bought blue-and-white shirts modelled on Blackburn Rovers, which became one of the club's symbols. According to one theory the name Grasshopper reflected great ambitions, because a grasshopper can leap many times its own height.
Over more than a century the club has won more national trophies than any other Swiss side: 27 Swiss league titles and 19 Swiss Cups, both records. It won its first championship as early as 1898, in the first season of the competition, and further titles followed in 1900, 1901 and 1905. By the time of the 1954 World Cup it had collected fourteen. In the 1920s under Izidor Kürschner it won the league in 1927 and 1928 and the first two editions of the Swiss Cup, in 1925–26 and 1926–27. The last league title dates from 2003, and the last cup from 2013, when the club beat FC Basel on penalties in the final.
In European competition the best period for Grasshoppers came in the 1970s. In 1977–78 the club reached the UEFA Cup semi-finals, eliminating Dinamo Tbilisi and Eintracht Frankfurt along the way, and was stopped only by SC Bastia. A year later it reached the quarter-finals of the European Champion Clubs' Cup. In later decades the team beat sides such as Real Madrid, Ajax and Torino in Europe. In 1995–96 it became the first Swiss club to play in the Champions League group stage and repeated it a year later; the team was coached by Christian Gross and included Ciriaco Sforza, Alain Sutter and Giovane Élber.
In the 1980s and 1990s the club dominated at home. It won titles in 1982–1984, 1990, 1991, 1995, 1996 and 1998, and took the cup three times in a row, in 1988, 1989 and 1990. Ottmar Hitzfeld was responsible for the first of these successes to the greatest degree, and the teenage Ramon Vega shone in his side. The championships of 2001 and 2003 came under Marcel Koller, former assistant to Gross. In 1989 the club also won the Swiss Super Cup.
The team plays in blue and white, and from 1929 to 2007 its home was the Hardturm stadium. After its closure and demolition, completed in December 2008, Grasshoppers have shared the Letzigrund with FC Zürich, the great city rival. Plans for a new stadium on the site of the old Hardturm have dragged on for years, and since the move the club has not regained its old standing. In the twenty-first century its greatest success remains the cup win of 2013, which ended a ten-year trophy drought.
The tradition of the club is nonetheless exceptional: Grasshopper Club Zürich is the oldest football club in the city and the second oldest in the Swiss league, a symbol of Swiss football for more than 140 years. Its history, begun by English schoolboys and Hans Gamper, remains the foundation on which the club tries to rebuild its place among the national elite.