FC Luzern FC Luzern are a club whose greatest triumph came after a 29-year wait, celebrated in an empty, pandemic-stricken stadium in front of no fans at all. The club, known to supporters as Die Leuchten, traces its founding to 12 August 1901, when friends Adolf Coulin, Ernst Haag and Hans Walter - who had learned the game in French-speaking Switzerland - gathered with other football enthusiasts at the Floragarten restaurant near Lucerne's train station to establish Fussball-Club Luzern. Training began just days later on the Allmend, a stretch of green space south of the city centre that would remain synonymous with the club for over a century, and the team played its first official match in April 1902 away to SC Zofingen. The club's blue-and-white colours are drawn directly from the coats of arms of the city and canton of Lucerne.
For most of its first six decades Luzern remained a modest, mid-table force in Central Switzerland, occasionally employing foreign coaches, before finally breaking through in 1960, when a late goal from substitute Robert Blättler beat FC Grenchen 1-0 to deliver the club's first Swiss Cup. A second followed in 1992, a 3-1 extra-time win over FC Lugano, but the club's only league championship arrived three years earlier, in 1989, under German coach Friedel Rausch, a UEFA Cup winner with Eintracht Frankfurt who spent seven years in Lucerne and led the side to a title race decided on the final day against Grasshopper Club. The years that followed brought painful near-misses, with Luzern losing four consecutive cup finals between 1997 and 2012, against Sion, Zurich and twice against Basel.
The long wait for a third trophy finally ended on 24 May 2021, when, managed by Fabio Celestini, Luzern beat FC St. Gallen 3-1 in the Swiss Cup final at Bern's Wankdorf stadium - a match played behind closed doors because of COVID-19 restrictions, with goals from Ndiaye, Wehrmann and Schürpf sealing a first trophy in 29 years. Luzern had played at the old Stadion Allmend since 1934, a ground that once held a record crowd of roughly 26,000 for a match against Basel, before moving in 2011 to the newly built Swissporarena, constructed on the very same site, where the club continues to play its home matches today.
