Rorschach

David against Goliath was not a metaphor Sportanlage Kellen chose lightly when FC Rorschach-Goldach 17 drew Basel in the Swiss Cup and had to prepare a squad of part-timers for a club that plays in front of crowds forty times the size of their own ground. The tie summed up a side built five divisions below where football in the region gets noticed, working out of a stadium that holds 2,400.

The club itself is barely a decade old in its current form, though its roots run back further. FC Rorschach 1907 carried the town's name for a century, reaching no further nationally than the fourth round of the Swiss Cup in 1989/90, before merging on 1 July 2017 with neighbouring FC Goldach 1949 to form FC Rorschach-Goldach 17, pooling two clubs' players and histories into one of the larger football operations on the eastern side of Switzerland, in the canton of St Gallen.

Results since have tracked upward rather than dramatic: top of the 2. Liga Regional table when the 2020/21 season broke off under pandemic restrictions, then a step up to 2. Liga Interregional, the fourth tier, in the seasons that followed. Dejan Janjatović spent the 2021/22 campaign at the club, a midfielder who came through Bayern's academy and had already played for St Gallen in the Swiss Super League before turning out in red and white at Kellen.

Basel remains the name attached to the club's one moment of wider attention, a Cup pairing that put a fourth-tier side from the shore of Lake Constance across from one of the country's most decorated teams, the kind of draw a club this size gets once and builds a story around.