Baden

One season is what FC Baden has to show for its only visit to the top flight. The club reached the Nationalliga A in 1985 and lasted a single campaign there before dropping back down, and no Swiss Cup, no league title, just that one brief stay among the country's best sides. It came after two earlier climbs into the Nationalliga B, in 1964 and again in 1979, and long before either of them a run to the Swiss Cup quarter-finals in 1950 had already shown what the club was capable of on its best days.

The more recent promotion, into the Challenge League in 2023, ended the same way the 1985 one did: straight back down, in 2024. Baden's football has tended to run in these short bursts rather than settled spells at any one level, and the club founded on 1 July 1897 has built its identity as much around producing players as keeping them. Mladen Petrić and Vedad Ibišević both passed through the youth ranks before their international careers took them elsewhere, and Diego Benaglio, later a Switzerland goalkeeper, started out the same way. That pipeline is formal now: Baden is a founding member of Team Aargau, a youth partnership it runs jointly with FC Aarau and FC Wohlen.

Aarau is also the name on the other side of the fixture that matters most to Baden supporters.