Basel occupy a kind of no-man’s-land where they are a bit too good for Switzerland, yet not quite strong enough to compete with Europe’s elite, club president Bernhard Heusler says.
The Swiss league champions, who host Chelsea in a Europa League semi-final first leg today, like to be seen as a club who do everything right.
Basel train and develop local players, keep ticket prices affordable for fans, shun rich investors and are financially viable.
Photo: Reuters
They have been rewarded with three successive national league titles, two consecutive Swiss Cup wins and boast an impressive average attendance of 28,000.
However, when it comes to European competition they have to accept the role of minnows, a situation they share with many clubs from outside the big five leagues of England, Spain, Italy, France and Germany.
“We are in a special situation where we have won the championship three times in a row, but on the other hand the investment we need for the Champions League is too high for the reality of the national league,” Heusler said in an interview. “We are walking a tightrope and this is something we share with a lot of clubs. I know the Chelsea supporters will think of us as just a small Swiss club.”
In bygone days teams from Switzerland occasionally reached the semi-finals of the European Cup, while clubs from Belgium, Romania, Scotland, Sweden and Greece all got as far as the final.
The gap now between the big five leagues and the rest is getting ever wider and Basel are typical of a small club who find that mounting a challenge for the UEFA Champions League is simply beyond their means.
Instead they have to be content with domestic dominance and the second-tier Europa League.
Remembering how Zurich reached the European Cup semis 36 years ago, Heusler said: “That seems impossible nowadays.”
“It is not so long ago that in Switzerland you could watch one English match every year, the FA Cup final. Everybody would watch it on television and that was the big thing,” he said. “Nowadays, fans can watch English league games 10 times a week if they want. They can watch Barcelona every week, too, so it’s understandable the level of expectation has risen. I believe all leagues in Europe below the top five are suffering a bit because of this.”
Despite their excellent home gates, the money generated from gate receipts, television rights and sponsorship is still only enough to generate revenue of between SF30 million (US$32 million) to SF35 million a season. Annual expenditure is about SF40 million to SF45 million, with Basel using other sources such as transfer sales and income from European competition to bridge the gap.
The best academy products, such as Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit Xhaka, often leave early in their careers for foreign teams, but Heusler emphasized the club do not count on transfer income every season.
“We don’t budget for it,” he said. “It would be easy to generate 30 or 40 million Swiss francs out of transfers in one year, but then we would lose the quality in the squad. I want to strengthen the basis of the club’s finances so this gap will be smaller and we can afford not to be successful for two or three years in a row without being afraid the club will go belly up.”
Basel have adopted a three-tier structure in their squad.
One third consists of experienced Swiss or foreign players, another third of youngsters raised at the club and the remainder is made up of foreigners who use the Swiss champions as a springboard to a career in one of the bigger leagues.
Despite his delight at Basel’s Europa League progress, Heusler said it was not the same competition as the Champions League, where they reached the round-of-16 last season.
“We played AS Roma in successive years, one year in the Europa League and one in the Champions League,” he said. “In the Europa League we had 15,000 people and we had trouble getting that many. One year later we had 36,000, fully sold out. It’s the money.”
“People can tell me what they want, but at the end of the day the huge amounts of money in the Champions League have brought about a huge difference in the way the competitions are looked at by the public,” Heusler said. “People believe it’s much more important to play a Champions League game than a Europa League game, which is sad in a way. I remember the times when we had the European Cup, UEFA Cup and European Cup Winners’ Cup, and as a fan at the time it was not important for me where we played, it was just wonderful to play in Europe.”
A sumo star was born in Japan on Sunday when 24-year-old Takerufuji became the first wrestler in 110 years to win a top-division tournament on his debut, triumphing at the 15-day Spring Grand Sumo Tournament in Osaka despite injuring his ankle on the penultimate day. Takerufuji, whose injury had left him in a wheelchair outside the ring, shoved out the higher-ranked Gonoyama at the Edion Arena Osaka to the delight of the crowd, giving him an unassailable record of 13 wins and two losses to claim the Emperor’s Cup. “I did it just through willpower. I didn’t really know what was going
The US’ Ilia Malinin on Saturday produced six scintillating quadruple jumps, including a quadruple Axel, in the men’s free skate to capture his first figure skating world title. The 19-year-old nicknamed the “Quad god,” who is the only skater to land a quadruple Axel in competition, dazzled with an array of breathtakingly executed jumps starting with his quad Axel and including a quadruple Lutz in combination with a triple flip and a quadruple toe loop in combination with a triple toe. He added an unexpected triple-triple combination at the end to earn a world-record 227.79 in the free program for a championship
Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter is being criminally investigated by the IRS, and the attorney for his alleged bookmaker said Thursday that the ex-Los Angeles Dodgers employee placed bets on international soccer — but not baseball. The IRS confirmed Thursday that interpreter Ippei Mizuhara and Mathew Bowyer, the alleged illegal bookmaker, are under criminal investigation through the agency’s Los Angeles Field Office. IRS Criminal Investigation spokesperson Scott Villiard said he could not provide additional details. Mizuhara, 39, was fired by the Dodgers on Wednesday following reports from the Los Angeles Times and ESPN about his alleged ties to an illegal bookmaker and debts well
MLB on Friday announced a formal investigation into the scandal swirling around Shohei Ohtani and his former interpreter amid charges that the Los Angeles Dodgers superstar was the victim of “massive theft.” The Dodgers on Wednesday fired Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani’s long-time interpreter and close friend, after Ohtani’s representatives alleged that the Japanese two-way star had been the victim of theft, which was reported to involve millions of dollars and link Mizuhara to a suspected illegal bookmaker in California. “Major League Baseball has been gathering information since we learned about the allegations involving Shohei Ohtani and Ippei Mizuhara from the news media,” MLB