At FCB there are financial reasons: YB, Basel and GC are abandoning the winter training camp

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The twelve Super League clubs said goodbye to the winter break on Sunday evening, and the first players have already posted photos of the sun via social media. The fun is short: the teams will start again on January 2 or 3. And a few days later, as is tradition, we go south – to the training camp.

For everyone? Not quite. The early start of the second half of the season (January 20) raised the question of meaning in planning the winter preparation for the training camp. This time, three leading clubs are not training at all in pleasant temperatures of 20 degrees and sunshine. Leaders YB, the Grasshoppers and FC Basel are preparing at home.

“It would not have been possible due to the short Christmas holiday and the short preparation for the restart,” YB, who flew to Spain for years, explains the decision. GC sports director Bernt Haas (45) says: “The second half of the season starts again on January 20, the preparation is very short. If you fly to training camp, you lose two days. One of the circumstances is that we have players who go abroad for the winter break. We don’t want to leave right away to help them acclimatize.”

Financial reasons also play a role in FCB. On January 6 there will be a friendly match against Bayern Munich at Joggeli. The stadium is sold out – red and blue are expecting a net income in the six figures. Only then would it be too late to fly to the sun. This means that the financially struggling FCB makes money from Bayern’s play while saving the R200,000 that a training camp costs. No problem for coach Fabio Celestini (48), he even sees advantages in staying at home: “If you train in the heat and then return to Switzerland, where it is 2 degrees and the fields are not so good, there is a risk of injury. We have artificial grass in Basel if we cannot use the lawn. And if we stay in Switzerland for the whole of January, we will be used to the conditions that await us at the start of the second half of the season.

FC Zurich is also doing something new: it flies to the training camp, but no longer to Turkey, as has been the case for years, but to Spain. FC St. Gallen, Lucerne, Lugano and Lausanne-Sport are also preparing for the Mediterranean. FC Winterthur moves to the training camp hotspot around Antalya in Turkey. Tunisia is Yverdon’s destination, Servette has the longest journey of all Super League teams ahead of him, Dubai. Stade Lausanne-Ouchy is promoted very differently, which decided to spend a week in Ticino.

Source : Blick