Rapperswil

The town on Lake Zurich had two names before it had one club: Rapperswil and Jona ran separate administrations until 2007, but the football side had already made its choice decades earlier, forming in 1928 as a single organisation rather than a merger of rival town teams. Nearly a century in the lower divisions followed without much to show for it, which makes the club's recent turn harder to ignore.

FC Rapperswil-Jona won the Promotion League, Switzerland's third tier, in 2016–17, then did it again in 2024–25, each time earning the step up to the Challenge League. Between those two promotions sits the thing that actually changed the club's profile: in 2025, Xherdan Shaqiri came in as a minority shareholder and investor. He never played for FCRJ himself, but his brother Erdin Shaqiri and his agent Arber Sakiri joined as advisers on talent and transfers, and the Shaqiri name now carries further than anything the club did on the pitch.

The nickname predates all of that. Rapperswil was known as the "Rosenstadt" — the City of Roses — long before it had a football club worth naming after it, and "Rosenstadtklerus" still ties the team to that older identity rather than to the 2007 merger. Red shirts, black sleeves.

Home games are played at the Stadion Grünfeld, a ground built for a third-tier crowd rather than a promotion push — 2,500 seats, nothing more. It has not needed to be bigger. For a club that spent most of its history without a single Swiss international to point to, the Grünfeld has simply been where Rapperswil-Jona plays, season after season, on the shore of the lake that gave the old town its name.