MONACO. Switzerland’s shrunken European season takes its next step on Friday afternoon, when Lugano and Thun learn their league phase opponents in the Conference League draw at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco. Of the four Swiss clubs that began the continental summer, these two are what remains.
Lugano earned their place the hard way. A 1-1 draw away to Maccabi Tel Aviv on Thursday, played in Batumi, Georgia, where the Israeli club hosts its European ties, completed the job a 2-1 home win had started. It will be the Ticinesi’s fifth league or group phase since 2017, a run of continental competence no other Swiss club currently matches.
Thun arrive by parachute. Eliminated by Lech Poznan in the Europa League play-off, a 2-2 draw at home on Thursday ending the tie after a heavy first leg defeat in Poland, the Bernese Oberlanders drop into the third tier’s league phase, their first group stage of any European competition since 2014.
The two who fell short did so with honour of varying degrees. St Gallen, a man down after Stevanovic’s red card, lost 3-2 at home to Nordsjaelland and with it the tie, after a 1-0 defeat in Denmark. Sion went to Amsterdam needing a miracle against Ajax and lost 5-3 despite the fight they showed, Winsley Boteli scoring a hat-trick, after the 4-2 home defeat that had already decided matters.
The draw’s mechanics reward the strong. Thirty-six clubs are split into six pots by UEFA coefficient, the pots are paired, one with two, three with four, five with six, and each club draws one home and one away opponent from each paired set: six matches, starting in October. Lugano sit in pot three alongside Getafe, Twente and KuPS; Thun are in pot six, where CSKA Sofia wait with the play-off survivors.
Pot one, featuring Atalanta, Ajax, Freiburg, Monaco, Braga and Copenhagen, is the one both Swiss clubs must face. Somewhere in that list is the marquee night that pays for the season’s travel and fills a stadium that needs filling.
The stakes go beyond the two clubs. With no Swiss representative in the Champions League for the first time since the format change, the country’s coefficient, the rolling ranking that decides future access, depends on Lugano and Thun winning matches. Every point they take this autumn is a small deposit against the spiral that kept Switzerland out of Thursday’s other draw.
The fixtures follow the draw, and the money follows the fixtures: league phase participation is worth millions in UEFA distributions before a ball is kicked, with more for every win. For clubs of Lugano’s and Thun’s budgets, that is not a bonus. It is the business plan.
The draw begins at 1pm and will be shown live on free-to-air television in Switzerland. Two clubs, six pots, and the long arithmetic of a coefficient that needs repairing: Swiss football’s European season starts here, one tier below where it wanted to be, and determined to climb back.