Pfadi Winterthur

In 2021, when Pfadi Winterthur finally lifted the Swiss Handball League title again, it ended a wait of seventeen years — the previous one had come in 2004. The gap sat oddly against everything the club had built before it: nine championships between 1992 and 2004 had made Pfadi the dominant force in Swiss handball.

The name traces back to the Swiss Scout Movement, the Schweizer Pfadfinderbund, out of which the club grew in 1938. Matches are played in red and black, at a hall in Winterthur with room for 2,000.

Beyond the ten league titles, Pfadi has taken the Swiss Cup five times, most recently in 2018, and pushed into the European game further than most Swiss sides manage, reaching the EHF Champions League quarter-finals three times and a Challenge Cup final in 2001.

None of it draws the same reaction locally as the fixture against Kadetten Schaffhausen, the Swiss Derby, which carries a weight the league table alone doesn't explain.