FC Thun

In March 2026, Thun were champions of Switzerland for the first time in their history, a title won with Mauro Lustrinelli in charge as coach — twenty years earlier, he had led the forward line through the most celebrated season the club had known. The route to that title ran through a boardroom crisis: by 2023 the club carried a negative equity of €4.7m and stood close to bankruptcy, until investors Chien Lee and Beat Fahrni took over and rebuilt it. The turnaround was rapid: the Challenge League title in 2024/25 sent Thun back into the top flight, and within a single season they had won it outright.

Founded on 1 May 1898 in the Bernese Oberland town of Thun, the club reached the top division, the Nationalliga A, for the first time in 1954 and lost the Swiss Cup final the following year to La Chaux-de-Fonds. Decades passed before Thun mattered again on that scale. The 2004/05 season brought a second-place league finish, then a place in the Champions League group stage alongside Arsenal, Ajax and Sparta Prague — Nelson Ferreira scored the goal that put Thun on the scoresheet against Arsenal. A UEFA Cup tie against Hamburg followed the next year. Relegation arrived in 2007/08, promotion back in 2010, relegation again in 2019/20. The Swiss Cup itself has never been won; Thun lost a second final in 2019, 1-2 to Basel.

Home games are played at the Visana Stadion, known for years as the Stockhorn Arena, which holds 10,000 in the club's red and white. Locally the team are called the Bergler — the mountain people, after the Oberland hills around the ground.

Lustrinelli is the name that ties the two eras together: a striker in the side that faced Arsenal in 2005, he came back to Thun as coach and, two decades later, took the club to the league title it had never won as a player.