La Chaux-de-Fonds

FC La Chaux-de-Fonds walked out at the Stade de la Charrière and held Benfica to a draw before losing the return leg — a run that took the club into the Round of 16 of the European Cup.

The championship of 1963–64 was the third the club had taken, and it sat inside a run of six Swiss Cups collected between 1948 and 1961. That decade and a half carried the names of players such as Charles Antenen, captain and forward, who won 56 caps for Switzerland and went to three World Cups, and Marcel Mauron, who finished the 1954–55 season as the league's top scorer with 36 goals. Neither man was still playing by the time the run ended.

What followed took much longer to arrive than the golden years had taken to pass. By 2009 the club had dropped out of the Challenge League altogether, down into the third tier, the finances behind it as thin as the results. The following decade brought three promotions in four seasons, proof that the drop had not been terminal, though it left FC La Chaux-de-Fonds well below where Antenen and Mauron had once taken it.

The rivalry that still draws a crowd to the Charrière is the one with FC Ajoie, played out as the Derby de l'Arc jurassien and carrying more weight locally than anything else on the calendar. The stadium itself holds around 12,700, mostly on standing terraces rather than in seats, built for nights bigger than most of what it now hosts.

Currently in the 1. Liga Classic, the fourth tier, the club spent the early months of 2025 fighting to stay out of the relegation places — a position a world away from Benfica, but the one the club plays from now.