Small Town, Big Story: FC Thun's Long Road to an Unlikely Championship

Thun. Population 44,000. Located in the Swiss Bernese Oberland, where the river Aare meets a lake, with the Alps as a backdrop. Switzerland's biggest military town. Not exactly a place you’d expect to find yourself talking about Champions League football next season.

And yet. FC Thun — a club that just got promoted from the second division — is on the verge of becoming Swiss champions in their very first year back in the top flight. It is, on its face, one of the great Cinderella stories in European football right now. But as anyone who has spent time with a club’s actual history knows, Cinderella stories are rarely just that.

Behind the headlines of this sensational season is a club that has been through it all: an archive that burned to the ground in 1975, a Champions League run in the early 2000s that nobody saw coming, a pair of scandals serious enough to make their own timeline entries, financial collapse, relegation, and a president who took the job because, as he put it, nobody else would.

My guest today is Medea Vögeli, historian and FC Thun researcher — the person who has spent years digging through what’s left of the club’s records and building out their documented history to a great interactive version on their website. She’s a Bern-based historian who came to Thun through academic curiosity, and is a fan of the club as well.

We talk about what kind of town Thun actually is, how this club has always punched above, below, and sideways, and whether this time around, the success might actually stick.

HELPFUL LINKS FOR TODAY's EPISODE:

FC Thun - Geschichte (interactive history timeline, German)

FC Thun anthem (YouTube)

Italian Stallion - Thun City (YouTube)

FC Thun in the Guardian

FC Thun on the BBC

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Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/