The name AC Bellinzona might ring a bell with the football aficionado of a certain vintage, but you’d be forgiven, especially if you don’t follow Swiss football very closely, of thinking, whatever became of them! Regular readers will know I write with enthusiasm and passion about Italian football, and by virtue you won’t be surprised to learn that my interest in Swiss football merely embraces the Italian speaking Swiss region of Ticino and its three professional clubs.
Lugano has for now become the household name of the region, a team and city that I wrote about in 2019. They are the Ticino flag (blue and red halves) carrier in the Swiss Super League, and in European competition once more this term. Chiasso, who play in the third tier are from the Italian border town of the same name down near the Como/Varese area. I will get to Chiasso one day, but Bellinzona has always been my Ticino team, a club I have kept an eye out from a distance for decades, something that hasn’t always been easy, especially when they fell off a cliff financially. Perhaps it helps that AC Bellinzona play in maroon, it certainly would have drawn me to them initially, and while these are not my club’s colours, when you live in Edinburgh, and my father was a Hearts man, this made my Swiss team selection easier.
I guess it was a legacy of the pandemic, when we mostly all had more time than was sensible to think, I drew up a very small list of teams I needed to see as I’d been cheering them from afar for too long. In what was to be a rather left field and mad weekend, I managed to tick the boxes of two of them, AC Bellinzona and FC Volendam in one trek, with both viewed in less than 40 hours over a weekend. You can read about the Volendam fairytale elsewhere in this magazine, but one thing was for sure, this trip was a long overdue visit to Bellinzona.
Despite being the Ticino capital, Bellinzona isn’t a place you read very much about at all, and yet oddly, the very day I booked my flights, there was the BBC’s Dan Roan standing on the streets of the city deliberating of the outcome of the trial that exonerated Michel Platini and Sepp Blatter of bribery and corruption following a hearing there. It’s a funny old world sometimes. With a population of just over 43,000, it is a relatively compact city, a very manageable size with about enough to entertain you for a day trip. The Alps are almost at their highest points all around Bellinzona, affording some extra shade on a hot day, but they also catch any passing cloud leading to an unexpected shower on occasion. You’ll be pleased to know UNESCO is all over Bellinzona (where aren’t they in truth!), and here it is the three castles have all been given that stamp of approval and protection. Unusually these castles weren’t built back in the day at the whim of a dandy fop, these were military installations. A marauding horde, having just come over the high San Gottardo pass would encounter a three pronged blockage in the valley courtesy of these fortified castles. Each one of them is quite spectacular, and the views from them are magnificent, especially the two higher up the hillside looking down on the city.
Swiss football, especially on the International stage has been a consistent performer for a number of years now. Winning their latest World Cup qualifying group ahead of Italy was a major shot in the arm ahead of this winter’s finals. When a smaller nation does well in International competition, it usually filters down to bigger crowds and a feel good factor on the terraces of the domestic game. Even without the National side’s success, the feel good factor is alive and well in Bellinzona as they are a club on its way back from the abyss.
Bellinzona succumbed to that most horrible fate of going bust in 2013 just ahead of the new season. This badly timed collapse resulted in them having insufficient days to find a saviour and be able to field a professional side. They played the 2013/14 season merely at youth levels, before coming back into the fold in the fifth tier, oddly known as 2 Liga. Slowly, but sensibly, the club rebuilt as they passed through the amusingly named fourth tier, 1 Liga Classic, and last season’s dramatic championship success in 1 Liga Promotion, the third tier. It didn’t look great when they lost at home to FC Breitenrain, who were already the league leaders late in the regular campaign. However in the post split final fixtures, Bellinzona overhauled the Breitenrain lead, including exacting revenge on them to win the title on the last day. Ironically Bellinzona would have been invited to go up anyway as Breitenrain withdrew their licence request, leading to the thought; was that just a case of sore grapes? No matter the reason, Bellinzona won the title, and have added this latest honour on their CV. It is always better to step up a level on your own merit, and this season “i Granata” (maroon, club colour and nickname), are into the second tier Challenge League for the first time in more than a decade.
The history of pre-bankrupt Bellinzona even saw the Swiss League title residing in the city, albeit just once in early post war days back in 1947/48. The club was founded in 1904, and its early history was in the lower tiers of the Swiss system, but from the thirties onwards the club started to get more regularly involved in the top two divisions. Perhaps uniquely Bellinzona have won at least one league title in the top five levels of Swiss football, with five Challenge League gongs to their name, albeit the last one in 1999/00 saw them lose a promotion play off versus a bottom club in the top flight and they didn’t go up! Thankfully life has improved since those days for all Swiss teams, but to win the second tier and not go up? That’s shocking in my book, an idea best kept from the self preservation society of the Scottish Premiership beeks!
In 2007/08 they were Swiss Cup runners up for the third time in the clubs history, the previous two didn’t bring any European action, but in 2008/09 i Granata played in the UEFA Cup as the cup representative of Switzerland. They certainly didn’t let the country down, progressing by Ararat Yerevan in the First Round, and claiming the scalp of Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk from Ukraine winning home and away for a 5-3 aggregate win. Galatasaray were next up, a step up too far, but they only just, lost 4-3 at home in a belter of a game, before winning in Istanbul 2-1, an impressive feat. The aggregate score saw them exit the competition only on the away goals rule. Such a titanic and brave effort by the unfancied Bellinzona.
It was in the early days of this new second tier adventure in the Challenge League that I finally made it to Bellinzona for just the club’s third home game of the season, a Friday night under the lights gig, complete with stunning mountain backdrop at the Stadio Communale versus Aarau. There are not many club names in the world with just one solitary consonant for sure! I had flown from Edinburgh to Zurich directly in the morning, and with regular trains down to Milan all stopping at Bellinzona, the need to fret wasn’t there even if any delays had occurred. Everything ran smoothly, and from a 9.25am (Swiss time) flight I was checked into my hotel across from the railway station before 3pm, plenty of time to plunder the city ahead of an 8pm kick off.
When I was in Lugano in 2019, the programme for that match versus Basel included an article suggesting a growing groundswell of enthusiasm for a Ticino super team. It was a horrible thought, Lugano have had financial issues too, but both Bellinzona and Lugano have the population base to continue the tradition of clubs from each city. Chiasso is considerably smaller, but it would also bring next to nothing to the table in terms of adding to any potential super team, so I am sure the good people of all three cities would much rather that they were left to their own devices. While Lugano to Bellinzona is less than a thirty minute journey, fans would get disillusioned, even if they got onboard with such a mad concept. It still wouldn’t bring the results that any money man behind such a venture would probably dream of when such a suggestion was muted. Three years on, thankfully nothing has happened, and as Bellinzona edge closer to their renewed rivalry with Lugano, like all good derbies across the border in Italy, it’s a healthy one and thrives on the competition between the two.
The proximity of Milan and now Monza in Serie A, with well run, monied Como likely to be the next to hit the top flight close to the Swiss border, it can perhaps all be a bit of a distraction to those who live in Chiasso and Lugano especially, but a strong Bellinzona, back amongst the big boys will arrest the viewing drain and help put Ticino calcio back on the map in Switzerland and beyond. Serie A clubs do like testing younger loanees out in the Italian speaking Swiss teams, and the higher you go, the higher the calibre of player you might be able to attract for a season, although it should be acknowledged that this isn’t a sustainable model if there are too many involved.
The Stadio Comunale in Bellinzona is centrally located, a 10/15 minute walk from the station or downtown. It isn’t a great venue, a smallish main stand, and low but adequate terracing on the opposite side, stretching round behind the goal. Alas, thanks to the running track (thankfully only 6 lanes), the action is a little distant. The away fans have a fairly restricted viewing area behind the opposite goal, where not only a fence and a running track separate them, they also have partial annoyance of a great number of high poles where presumably they’ll sling a net for the hammer athletics event when necessary. It has to be said, I have never been at a game, even as low as the Faroese second tier, or the following day to this clash at Young Fellows Juventus in Zurich (Swiss third tier), where a stadium didn’t have one single advertising board! A raft of potentially lost revenue surely for Bellinzona?!
Aarau had a good clutch of fans down for this one, a town in the north east corner of German Switzerland near Liechtenstein. As usual the away fans are always first to spark into life. Bellinzona have their own Ultras squad, small in number, but they tried their best to raise the atmosphere, but in such an open plan environment and with the mountains a spectacular distraction, it’s not easy to get the laid back Ticino fans whipped in a fervour.
Aarau immediately seemed a more balanced team, they passed the ball around nicely, but weren’t unduly threatening. However on the half hour mark they took the lead from a nice move, but Bellinzona should have been level at the break when a rapid charge down the left, a cut inside creating the angle for the shot, but it was scuffed rather than blasted and the goalkeeper picked it up like a backpass. Thirty minutes of play later, on the hour mark Aarau doubled the advantage with another incisive move. It sparked a mini collapse in confidence from i Granata, and with 10 minutes left, it wasn’t just 3, but 4 nil, sparking a “fire drill” departure from the home terraces. It would merely have been a consolation, but another easy chance was passed up by Bellinzona, and looking at the post match stats, the ability to finish chances had been the big difference, Aarau scored 4 of 5 on target, while amongst Bellinzona’s 12 effort, six were on target, but they nothing to show for it.
It ultimately was a chasening defeat, even with a rather harsh scoreline, but coming on the back of a 1-4 home loss in the previous home outing to Lausanne Ouchy, they are undoubtedly missing the opening night goal hero Sergio Cortelezzi from the win 1-0 over Lausanne. He subsequently broke his metatarsal after scoring again in week two in the 1-1 draw at Thun. It hasn’t all been doom and gloom, a fine win at Vaduz squeezed between these two heavy home losses, which suggests this team have what it takes to survive in the second tier this term. Ultimately that must be the ambition for i Granata, with a crack at the Super League at some point in the near future in their sights, surely. Bellinzona is a lovely place, and while the ground isn’t great, you don’t change the teams you cheer for, and I will always keep an eye out for their results, and who knows, maybe I will be back one day again. It’s certainly within easy reach from the Italian side of the border, the preferred route for me next time.
Football Adventures with James Rendall 