Young Boys

Seventeen championships is a lot for a club to carry.

The club began on 14 March 1898, when four schoolboys — Max Schwab, Otto Schwab, Hermann Bauer and Franz Kehrli — put a name to it. Yellow and black followed, and with them the nickname Die Bienen, the Bees.

The derby against FC Thun carries the weight of shared ground rather than shared history at the top — Bern and its canton, one city's club against the region's other side, and the history between them adds an edge that league position alone doesn't explain.

Walter Eich kept goal through the era that produced four league titles in a row between 1957 and 1960, under Albert Sing, and that run is still the benchmark anyone measures a good Young Boys side against. More recently it was Romelu Lukaku who passed through Bern before the move that made his name across Europe — a reminder that the club's academy and first team have, at times, been a stop on the way rather than a destination, without that changing what happened on the pitch while he was there.