The early football nation of Switzerland

The Bernese are considered attached to their homeland and proud of their dialect, which is popular throughout Switzerland. It is therefore all the more strange that the Stadtbern football team has an English name: Young Boys (YB). And in the Wankdorf Stadium, the YB-Heimat, the motto “Young Boys forever” can be found in several places. A typical “modern” English slogan from a marketing department? Not at all. The slogan has been an important part of Wankdorf Stadium since day one.

Since then, the yellow-black love has stood for “eternity”. However, this (love) story started even earlier. In another century even. The slogan was already formulated by the members when the club was founded in 1898 and is still used by the young boys used. But why an English club name with an English motto?

Football was introduced to Switzerland in the second half of the 19th century, mainly by British pupils, students, merchants and teachers. They worked or studied in Switzerland, brought the game from their homeland – England is the motherland of modern football – and popularized it among the Swiss.

Conversely, there were also Swiss – but relatively fewer – who got to know football during their stay in Great Britain and later propagated it at home. For example Treytorrens de Loys. De Delsberger studied engineering at King’s College London in the 1880s and then made a career in the Swiss army. During World War I, he commanded the 2nd Division of the Swiss Army and was subsequently promoted to General. De Romand brought home the love of football and, partly because of him, a certain understanding of this sport gradually developed in higher military circles.

The terms of the freshly imported game were, of course, all in English. Not only the name of the sport in Swiss German – “tschuute” or “tschutte”, “schuute” or “schutte” – comes from English (“to shoot”), but also terms such as fine, corner or keeper are still the norm in Swiss football today. The Swiss football pioneers did not speak of “soccer” but of the “football game”, the clubs were sometimes given English names such as Old Boys Basel or Grasshoppers Club Zurich baptized was the name of the football association when it was founded in 1895 Swiss Football Associationn and became the defender back called.

Exactly where and when the first football match in Switzerland was played cannot be reconstructed with certainty. The earliest evidence can be found for the Lake Geneva region from the 1860s: match reports and announcements can be found in the contemporary press where Englishmen from Geneva and Lausanne are said to have met for football matches. In addition to the Italian educational institutions Chateau de Lancy And La Chatelaine Football may have been played as far back as 1853 and 1869 respectively, with the students descended from wealthy families from Britain.

In the 1870s, the first football clubs were founded and the Swiss were also involved. This is how the oldest existing football club in Switzerland, the FC St Gallen1879 by merchants or former students of the Wiget Institute launched in Rorschach. During their education, they got to know football through their English teachers.

The strong British presence and economic ties with the United Kingdom in trade and tourism were important conditions for the football “Imported” in Switzerland and became known relatively early. Modern football – modern in the sense of a game with fixed and written rules – spread across the British Isles between 1840 and 1860 (the “wild” popular football with no codified rules can be traced back to the High Middle Ages).

In a continental European comparison, it is also striking that the new sport spread more quickly in countries that were more industrially developed at the time football emerged. In addition to Switzerland, these were mainly Belgium and Denmark. The industrial age produced a young and ambitious class of society that stood for free trade, cosmopolitanism and competition and saw these values ​​fulfilled in football as well: there are universal rules and it is an open comparison of performance between two teams.

Switzerland’s international integration also played a role in the further spread of football in continental Europe: German, French and Italian football pioneers learned the game at Swiss universities and high schools, Swiss businessmen and academics helped establish football clubs in the South from Europe. Europe. The most famous example of this is Hans “Joan” Gamper from Winterthur, who in 1899 met like-minded FCBarcelona established. There were also gymnastics teachers from Romandie who, at the invitation of the Bulgarian Minister of Education, taught at various schools and let them play football there.

From the 1880s, football was also played in some state schools in Switzerland and in 1898 it found its way to the Swiss Gymnastics School, at the time a kind of framework curriculum for gymnastics and physical education. At that time, the educational institutions and content – apart from the Catholic-conservative cantons – were mid-liberal in character, and football, which came from the same cosmos, suited it well.

However, the game was especially compatible with Swiss schools because it was in its original British form and aimed at the bourgeois-elitist public schools had a deeply educational (or as they said at the time, educational) claim: it was about competition and practicing rules, teamwork and a certain kind of masculinity.

The students were to be raised to be strong, disciplined and healthy men. According to the Swiss Gymnastics School from 1898: “Fast, purposeful, energetic, but thoroughly selfless and acting only in the general interest of the game, characterizes the good footballer, who probably best demonstrates the value of football as an educational tool.”

In German-speaking countries, this particular idea of ​​education was summed up with the term physical education together, so the idea that training the body has an impact on the soul and intellect of young people. Many pioneer football clubs were also based on the physical educationis stated in the first statutes of the Grasshopper Club Zurichone of the objectives of the association is the “education of the body”. Bern young boys spoke of “strengthening the body”.

For the early footballers, however, a more important factor seemed to make the game attractive, as Fritz Schäublin, a member of the FC Basel of 1893, wrote in his memoirs of the pioneer days: “We played football then because we wanted to exercise our urge for physical training in a freer way than in a gymnastic club, and we hoped to find this satisfaction in football.” Schäublin is so distinct from gymnastics because many gymnastic exercises at that time (and until around the 1960s) were very reminiscent of military exercises. In addition to rim swings and handstands, synchronized marching and exercises were also done.

Although the gymnasts, who, like the football players, often came from the bourgeoisie, propagated the ideal of “physical education” and it was also gymnastics teachers who allowed football to be played in schools, the powerful and nationally conservative oriented gymnastics movement initially fought en masse against the new type of football: it is a one-sided, dangerous and non-Swiss sport because it is a foreign import product. Football players would also exercise for fun rather than preparing for civic duties such as military service.

However, this did not detract from the growing popularity of football: today it is one of the most popular sports in the country, “smash” 280,000 active players together and against each other every weekend.