La Chaux-de-Fonds

La Chaux-de-Fonds sit in the Swiss League, having decided the club will not chase promotion back to the National League while the finances stay tight — a caution earned the hard way after coming down from the top flight in 2015 and never finding the money to go back up. The title in 2023 and its repeat in 2024 kept the club at the front of the second tier, though the 2024–25 crown went instead to EHC Visp.

None of that touches what the club was in the late 1960s. Between 1968 and 1973 it won six straight Swiss championships, a run of consecutive titles no other club in the country has matched, playing those years in jerseys cut in the style of the Montreal Canadiens. The league changed how it crowned a champion more than once across that stretch — sometimes by final league standings, sometimes by a round-robin among the top sides — and each time La Chaux-de-Fonds came out on top regardless of the format put in front of them.

The fall since has been just as real: out of the top division in 1979, down again to the third level in 1984, and after a brief return, relegated once more in 1998 and again in 2001, finishing bottom that year. The club has stayed in the second tier ever since, save for that single season back up in 2015.

Four numbers hang retired from that championship era, and the two names attached to them who also went further wore the captain's letters of the national side: René Huguenin and Gaston Pelletier both played for Switzerland at the 1972 Winter Olympics, Huguenin on the blue line, Pelletier up front. The derby with HC Ajoie, fought as the "Derby des Horlogers" between two watchmaking towns, still carries more heat than most fixtures in the second tier. In the scoring books it's Michael Neininger who stands clear of everyone else who has worn the jersey, 719 points from 617 games, a mark from a much later era than the one the retired numbers belong to.