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A look at www.hallenmasters.ch actually says it all. The last message on the homepage was from October 25, 2016 and read: “Hallenmasters 2017 canceled.”
Indoor football in Switzerland – it’s been dead for years, but how did it get to this point? And could the demise of the once popular sport have been prevented?
Fully covered stadium, full box office
Flashback. A look back to January 1983 shows how popular indoor football once was in Switzerland: at that time an international tournament was taking place in Zurich’s Hallenstadion. Highlight: 37-year-old Kaiser Franz Beckenbauer as a ranking player, signed for this one occasion. When the Zurich team met (and lost) Dinamo Zagreb in the final, the Lion Temple was sold out with 10,000 spectators and the Hoppers bosses as organizers were looking forward to a quarter of a million francs in revenue, thanks in part to the 30,000 tickets fully sold .
Roger Wehrli, Beckenbauer’s classification teammate at the time, is still enthusiastic about this unique experience. “To be able to play with such a world star was sensational. He had no charisma and grace and spoke normally to us. That was definitely the highlight of my career as a futsal player.”
Indoor football also flourished in the years that followed. Not only in Switzerland, but also in Germany (keyword “Budenzauber”) and in Austria (with the legendary Vienna City Hall tournament). Wehrli: “With GC we went to a tournament in Berlin three times, and with Luzern we played once in Frankfurt. They were always real folk festivals with a large audience and a great atmosphere.”
In 1996, indoor football caused a revolution in Switzerland
Berchtoldstag 1995 would be groundbreaking for indoor football in Switzerland. On that day – again in the indoor stadium – an indoor football tournament took place. Among the nearly 2,000 spectators was Martin Blaser, now CEO of FC Lugano and at the time a young organizer and marketer of women’s tennis tournaments, who sat “out of boredom”.
When the legendary Timo Konietzka wrote in a Blick column the next day how unprofessional and provincial the event had been, Blaser pricked up his ears. He got Konietzka’s phone number, called him and explained that he would like to show him how such a tournament should be organized nowadays.
A few days later they met at Konietzka’s restaurant in Schwyz. Also surprisingly present was the then Blick sports director Sacha Widdorovits. He was immediately enthusiastic about Blaser’s plans and said: “We are there as a view.”
Blaser then resigned from the marketing company Octagon and, from April 1995, drove “the whole of Switzerland crazy,” as he says today. Within weeks he received commitments from well-known companies and signed a multi-year contract with CS as the main sponsor. In January 1996, the test event “Masters 96” took place in the Saalsporthalle in Zurich. The venue was sold out on both days and Swiss television broadcast live. Blaser: “After the last match I hugged everyone and said, ‘Läck, that’s great!'”
Each club received a starting fee
The association was also enthusiastic about the pilot project and a four-year contract was signed. Therefore, the first official Swiss indoor championships were held in 1997. Each club received a starting fee of 50,000 francs and had to participate in two qualifying tournaments. The final then took place in Basel. For Swiss clubs, indoor football was a welcome source of income and a good way to bridge the long winter break and keep the players happy. The public received the project largely positively, but it still resulted in a loss of almost a million.
The first winner in 1997 was Lausanne with coach Georges Bregy. “I am proud of this title,” he said immediately after winning the title. How does he see it today? ‘I’m still proud of it. Indoor football was at a very high level at the time, the players had a lot of fun and it promoted our team spirit.”
A revival? No chance!
The following year, Blaser and Co. to minimize the loss to 300,000 francs, and in 1999 there was even a black zero. But because many sponsorship contracts expired after the third year, Blaser had a fundamental question. «Although the three events were good, they were not a complete success. That is why we came to the conclusion that a fourth year no longer made sense and we terminated the contract with the league early.”
The winter fairy tale called the Swiss Indoor Championships was suddenly over. Indoor football was still played afterwards, for example at the Axpo Hallenmasters in Winterthur between 2006 and 2016, but the boom was over. A revival is out of the question for “Mister Indoor Football”, as Martin Blaser was called at the time: “With the current window calendar with the short winter break, that would be impossible. Indoor football in Switzerland is probably dead for good.”
Source : Blick
I’m Emma Jack, a news website author at 24 News Reporters. I have been in the industry for over five years and it has been an incredible journey so far. I specialize in sports reporting and am highly knowledgeable about the latest trends and developments in this field.
