Black Stars

Cedric Itten put on the black-and-white shirt of FC Black Stars Basel as a boy in 2003, years before Rangers or Werder Bremen or a Swiss national team call-up meant anything. The club that gave him his start sits in the Basel-Iselin district, one of the oldest quarter clubs in a city that also holds FC Basel, Nordstern, Concordia and Old Boys, and it has spent most of its existence well away from the spotlight those names attract.

It very nearly did not exist at all. A first attempt to form the club in 1905 fell apart when its founder, Karl Schuhmann, left the city, and it took until 12 March 1907 for Black Stars to be founded properly. In 1926 the side won the Serie Promotion Championship, the second tier of Swiss football at the time, only to lose the promotion play-off to FC Grenchen and stay short of the top flight. That near-miss set the pattern for much of what followed: 79 seasons were played in the fourth division before promotion to the Promotion League finally came in 2019, achieved by beating FC Baden in the play-offs.

Benjamin Huggel, a name known across Swiss football, later returned to the club as coach in 2015, and the connection did not end quietly — he later won a wrongful-dismissal case against the club. Local pride runs through the fixture with FC Concordia Basel, an Ortsderby fought closer to home than any Swiss Cup tie, though the cup has brought sterner tests: exits to FC Zürich in 2012 and 2014, and to FC St. Gallen in 2016.

Home games are played in front of a ground that holds 1,200.