NYON. Young Boys, Basel and Lugano will learn their league phase opponents on Thursday when UEFA makes the draws in Nyon, a short train ride from the stadiums that three of the four Swiss sides in Europe call home. For the Super League champions, a third appearance in the league phase in five seasons, the financial stakes run into the tens of millions of francs before a ball is kicked.
Young Boys enter the Champions League league phase as one of the lower seeded sides, which means a draw heavy with clubs from the top four associations. The new format, now in its third season, has been kinder to Swiss sides than the old group stage: more matches, more chances to progress, and a coefficient that has slowly climbed as a result. A modest run, six games and a respectable goal difference, is worth roughly CHF 25 million in UEFA money, a figure that exceeds the club's entire domestic broadcasting income.
Basel, in the Europa League, have the more navigable draw on paper and the more complicated one in practice. The club's start to the Super League season has been uneven, and the squad that will travel in September is still being settled. A run to the knockout round would ease the accounts and, more importantly, ease the pressure on a coaching staff that has already heard the first questions from the terraces.
Lugano, in the Conference League, are the Swiss side with the least to lose and, in the view of several coaches around the league, the most to gain. The Ticino club have built a squad that can compete on Thursday nights in mid size European cities, and the Conference League is the competition that was designed for exactly that. A winter in Europe would be a first, and a statement.
The draws themselves are theatre. Balls, pots, a hall in Nyon, and a few hours of analysis that will be revised the moment the first match is played. What matters, club officials say, is not the names but the travel: a trip to the eastern Mediterranean in December is a different proposition from a trip to the Low Countries, and the Super League does not stop to accommodate it.
Swiss clubs' recent European record is better than the standing joke about it. Young Boys have taken points off sides that were supposed to dismiss them. Basel's European nights remain a part of the club's identity even when the team is not. The coefficient, which determines how many Swiss sides qualify, has held, and Thursday's draw is the next test of whether it continues to.
The federation posted the travel and broadcasting arrangements on Tuesday, a transparency that fans enjoyed and that the clubs' commercial departments had already priced in. Ticket allocations for the home legs will be announced once the opponents are known. Demand, at the Wankdorf and St. Jakob Park, is not expected to be a problem.
Abroad, the performances will be noted in the usual places. Swiss clubs have a reputation for overdelivering in the first hour and fading in the second, a pattern the current generation of coaches has spent three seasons trying to break. Thursday's draw will not break it. The matches, from September, might.