Liestal

Liestal sits in the Basel-Landschaft countryside, a cantonal capital small enough that its football club has carried the town's name into competitions for well over a century. FC Liestal was founded on 3 July 1895, one of the ten oldest football clubs in Switzerland, and its Stadion Gitterli on Kasernenstrasse has stayed the club's home through all of it, with roughly 2,100 places, part of it under cover.

The high point came early and stayed distant for a long time: in 1928 Liestal reached the final of the Swiss Promotionsmeisterschaft and lost it on their own ground to Young Boys. The slide came in the 1950s, down as far as the third tier, and it took until the 1990s for the club to work its way back up. There was a reminder of the gap between local and national football in 2006, when a Swiss Cup tie brought Basel to Liestal and the Brazilian forward Cristiano dos Santos Rodrigues put three past them on his own.

Domestically, the club's silverware sits at cantonal level rather than national: the Basler Cup, won in 1979/80 and again in 1997/98, and the Reini Erbe-Cup, taken in 2003 as the region's football association named Liestal its best team. The rivalry that still gets called a derby in the local press is with SC Dornach — in 2018 the two met in the final for promotion to 1. Liga Classic, a match the papers simply called the Derby. Liestal have also fielded matches against SV Muttenz and FC Bubendorf, but it is Dornach the town cares about. The first team now plays in 2. Liga interregional, the fifth tier of Swiss football, and in 2025 the club set up its first women's team.

The name most attached to Liestal's academy is Tyara Buser, who came through the club between 2012 and 2015 before going on to Basel's women's side, where she won a Swiss championship and played in the Women's Champions League, then to Freiburg in Germany, and to a single cap for the Swiss national team in 2019.