Kadetten Schaffhausen

The Nationalliga A title has come with a cup double often enough that the treble barely raises comment locally.

The club's roots have nothing to do with handball: the Kadettencorps Schaffhausen was a militia corps for high-school students, founded in 1791. Indoor handball only entered the picture in 1966, when the section switched over from the outdoor game, and it took until 1988 for the team to reach the Nationalliga A for the first time. Everything the club is now known for was built after that promotion.

European nights have brought Kadetten closer than most Swiss sides get: a run to the EHF Cup final in 2010, lost to TBV Lemgo, followed by a EHF Champions League quarter-final in 2011/12 and a group-stage campaign in 2016/17. Since 2021 the EHF European League has become the regular ceiling, with quarter-final and last-16 finishes recurring often enough to look like a pattern rather than a surprise.

Since 2011/12 the team has played at the BBC Arena, built for 3,500 and shared with the Suisse Handball Academy, the national performance centre — a rare case of a club housing the country's own development programme under its own roof rather than sending players elsewhere to find it.

What Kadetten have not done, for all the domestic dominance, is turn a European quarter-final into anything further.