FC WIL 1900

Football in Wil grew out of a town of some 24,000 people in the canton of St Gallen, and the club that came from it has never pretended otherwise: Chliina Club, the small club, is a nickname the supporters use themselves rather than one thrown at them from outside. The date on the badge reads 1900, though the Swiss federation's own register puts the founding five years later — a discrepancy nobody in Wil has felt the need to settle.

For most of the century that followed, the club belonged to the lower tiers. The First League title in 1952 was the first mark of real progress, and it took until 1999 for the next one, when Wil won the Challenge League. They repeated it in 2002, and this time the promotion stuck.

The two seasons that followed are the ones the club is measured by. Fourth place in the Super League in 2003 remains the highest Wil have finished, and it brought European football to the Bergholz by way of the Intertoto Cup that summer. A year later came the Swiss Cup — the only major trophy in the club's history, won in 2004 by a side from a town smaller than the away supports it was beating.

The ground has changed name more often than the club has changed division. Built as the Sportpark Bergholz, it has since carried the branding of a coatings manufacturer and now a supermarket chain, running as the Lidl Arena. What has not changed is the scale of it, or the white and black.

Wil have played their football back in the second tier for most of the years since, which puts the whole of the club's top-flight story into a single stretch of seasons either side of that cup win. Total major honours since 1900: one.