FC Thun are not used to making headlines, but the newly crowned champions of Switzerland are arguably this season’s greatest European football story.
Home to fewer than 45,000 people and 16 miles (26 kilometres) south-east of Bern, Thun is not among the 10 biggest Swiss cities by population. Its football club, which marked its 128th anniversary on Friday, had never previously won a major trophy, were outside the top division for the previous five years, and had come close to bankruptcy.
Yet Thun, operating with one of the Swiss Super League’s lower budgets, sealed a historic title on Sunday. They lost 3-1 to Basel on Saturday night, but second-placed St Gallen lost 3-0 at home to Sion today — putting Thun an unassailable 10 points clear at the top of the table with three matches to go.
It is an achievement that ranks alongside Leicester City’s 5,000-1 Premier League title in 2015-16, Kaiserslautern winning the German Bundesliga as a newly promoted team in 1997-98, or the success of Swedish club Mjallby last season.
The Athletic spoke to some of the key people at Thun last month to find out just how much this title means to them.
A family identity
“This club is a family,” Thun’s president, Andres Gerber, tells The Athletic.
Gerber has become synonymous with Thun, having first joined them as a player when aged 30. He went on to make more appearances for them than anyone, including in the Champions League group stage, before later becoming a coach, then the director of football, before he was appointed to his current position in 2021.
Now 53, Gerber is indicative of a club with continuity — “Our staff has over 100 years together at Thun,” he explains.
Head coach Mauro Lustrinelli is Thun’s second-highest goalscorer (with 51) across two playing spells and is now in his third stint managing them. Assistant Nelson Ferreira joined the staff after retiring as a player with Thun in 2019.
Gerber, Lustrinelli and Ferreira all started Thun’s first-ever Champions League group match in September 2005, a stoppage-time 2-1 defeat by Arsenal at Highbury. Ferreira scored their goal.
Nelson Ferreira, now part of the Thun coaching staff, celebrates scoring for them against Arsenal in 2005 (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)
Fitness coach Eric-Pierre Zurcher came on board in 2008, while goalkeeping coach Patrick Bettoni did so in 2012 after the club were the final stop of his playing career. Sporting director Dominik Albrecht has been there 15 years. “We stayed for such a long time in Thun because money is not the most important thing for us,” explains Gerber.
The same criteria apply to the playing staff. Gerber spoke of previously identifying a “lack of team spirit” due to a high volume of loan signings. “So we decided to build the squad around players who could identify with Thun.”
Club captain Marco Burki spent two seasons on loan at Thun earlier in his career, then played in Belgium and elsewhere in Switzerland for four years before returning permanently in 2021. “I had problems with going to the second division. But I thought of how it was before (at Thun) and the same people — the president, fitness coach — were still there,” centre-back Burki tells The Athletic. “I knew how it was going to be.”
‘Press high, attack the space’
The sense of club identity extends to the team’s on-pitch philosophy.
“We want to be offensive, courageous, and dynamic,” Lustrinelli tells The Athletic. “You have to press high, recover the ball in the last third. When you have it, the first thing is (to go) vertical. I want us to go behind the defence, to attack the space with the ball and be efficient.”
Three years into Lustrinelli’s third coaching stint (but first in permanent charge), Thun were still in the second division. “(After Lustrinelli’s first season of this spell, in 2022-23) a lot of people said, ‘This f***ing philosophy, it’s not good,’” says Zurcher. “Mauro was angry. The players didn’t play like he wanted.”
Promotion arrived last season, as Thun won the second tier by 11 points. Nobody predicted what would happen next…
Small steps
Thun’s squad value of €22.4million (£19.3m, $26.3m at current rates) at the start of the season ranked eighth among the 12 Swiss Super League teams, as valued by Transfermarkt. It was a fraction of what Young Boys (€65.8m) and Basel (€57.4m) — both regulars in European football — had to spend.
“It was strange when we started training last summer and there were no new players because, in the 17 previous seasons, we always had new players,” Zurcher recalls.
The squad, and the approach, did not change after promotion. “The tactics have been the same since the start,” says Burki. “We built it up with small steps — if we did it well, we’d go to the next step. (Eventually) the old steps were automatic, and we would just go to the next step.”
Thun were realistic in their pre-season aims. Gerber, Lustrinelli and Zurcher all provide the same response when asked what they set out to achieve in 2025-26: “Finish in the top six.”
Victories in each of their first four league games built confidence. “We say in Swiss, ‘What you have, you have’,” says Gerber. “(So the attitude was) Be happy with these points, because you can use them against relegation.” Despite losing five times by mid-December, Thun were — to everyone’s surprise — leading the table.
The key moment, everyone agrees, was a home match against FC Zurich on December 20 — their final fixture before the season’s winter break.
Thun trailed 2-0 at half-time but rallied to win 4-2, scoring twice in the final five minutes.
“This was the moment we started to believe,” Gerber recalls. “We were the winter champions and that showed it was not just good form or good luck, it was something more. The energy in the stadium, the whole team fighting and running, was a pleasure to see.”
Making history
Eleven undefeated games later, of which they won 10 — including another second-half comeback win, this time 2-1, at Bern-based Young Boys — was when everyone else started to believe, too.
“Thun is seen a little bit like the small brother of Young Boys (with Bern being only a 30-minute drive away),” Burki, who began his career with the 17-time Swiss champions, explains.
“We have quality individuals, but we don’t have the league’s best players in every position. We can only achieve success as a team. Our big strength is being close with everyone and being on the same level.”
Fitness coach Zurcher describes how, after every game, he took a grab of the league table as a memento of the time Thun were top of the league.
“Every week, I would take a screenshot, and then another,” he says. “Now, I’m no longer doing it, because we’ve been No 1 for so long!”
Dead Poets. Carpe diem
President Gerber speaks of the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society, a coming-of-age drama in which schoolboys are inspired by poetry in 1950s America. “Some of my philosophy comes from that approach,” the 53-year-old says.
As a gift to Gerber, the players printed a photo of a team dinner, titled with the film’s most famous line of dialogue: “O captain, my captain.” His response was inspired by the plot’s messaging: ‘Carpe diem’ — Latin for ‘seize the day’.
“People talked about Thun winning the league, but around the squad, it was not a topic,” Zurcher said of their winning run. “There was no bonus for winning the championship (in players’ contracts) because it seemed so far away!”
Gerber recalls the start of his presidency in 2021. “The first goal was to survive, because financially and mentally, it was hard. Now, the situation is surreal.”
The change in fortunes has happened at a disorientating speed. “I don’t know if I really understand what’s going on at this moment. Maybe in two, three years, I will,” says Lustrinelli.
“Even now, I get tears thinking about the title,” admits Burki, 32. “I dream that everyone at the club has one hand on the trophy, and we lift it together.”
Burki, like everyone at Thun, has had little time to let the inevitability of their success sink in.
When asked how he would react to the title, Gerber said: “Maybe when I have the trophy in my hands with (coach) Mauro and (sporting director) Dominik, I will start to cry. I’m looking forward to realising these emotions with my family. Jumping around and singing is not my thing.”
Two photographs pinned on a wall in Gerber’s office sum up his club affinity. The first is of his son, Noe, in a Thun kit from nearly two decades ago, when his father was still playing for them.
The second shows Noe, who is now 23, and his sister Ana celebrating on the pitch at Thun’s Stockhorn Arena after the team secured promotion last summer.
More such photos are likely to appear in Gerber’s office next season.
“This is an example for anyone in life,” he says. “You can dream.”