Visp

Visp arrives at this season in the Swiss League, the country's second tier, on the back of a promotion-round campaign that ended, as it so often has, without a place in the National League. The club won the Swiss League title again in 2025, its fourth at that level after 1960, 2011 and 2014, and each of the previous three ended the same way: a champion's medal in the regular competition, then a play-off series against a top-flight side that Visp could not win. The pattern by now shapes how the season is read at the Lonza Arena — the league table matters less than what happens once the play-offs begin.

The identity built around it in recent years leans on the nickname Lions, adopted across the senior team and the youth ranks, with black, red and white on the shirt. It sits oddly next to a history that has produced only one national title outright: the 1962 championship, won 3–0 in the final against HC Davos under Richard "Bibi" Torriner, remains the only national title, where it stayed until 1971. A Swiss Cup followed in 1964, and for a stretch through the 1960s the team carried a forward line still remembered locally as the "Golden Trio" — Walter Salzmann, Kurt Pfammatter and Herold Truffer.

The Valais derby against HC Sierre has supplied the club's sharpest rivalry, the kind of fixture where the history between them adds an edge no league position can. More recently Visp's name has travelled further than the Swiss League table would suggest, through Nico Hischier, who passed through the youth academy before his NHL career, with his brother Luca following the same path.

None of it reaches back further than 1941, when the club was founded in the town under the same name, in the shadow of the Alps in Valais.