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FC Basel 1893 - euphoria in red-blue
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The FC Basel football (soccer) club was founded in 1893. The long-established club has won ten Swiss championships as well as seven cup victories, and in 2002 was the first Swiss team to reach the last sixteen in the Champions League.
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The FCB is one of Switzerland's most successful football teams. Since the string of victories achieved during the era of the trainer Helmut Benthaus, during which no fewer than seven of its total tally of ten Swiss championships and two cup victories were secured between 1967 and 1980, the FCB has established itself as one of the most popular football teams in Switzerland. With its most recent successes under the aegis of the current trainer Christian Gross, the club has been experiencing a boom unparalleled in Swiss sporting history.
The victorious so-called "double" in May 2002 (championship and cup in the same season) and the subsequent successes in the Champions League between July 2002 and March 2003 triggered widespread euphoria in the Basel region and a wave of admiration in the rest of Switzerland. The FCB, which is deeply anchored in the political and social structures of the entire region, became a high-profile standard-bearer for the city of Basel.
The FC Basel is supported on the one hand by its approx. 3000 club members, and on the other by a professional management team with the company FC Basel Marketing AG - which is responsible for commercial activities. The FCB maintains a clear focus on performance-related objectives with its National League A-team. At the same time, however, it also employs no less than five full-time youth trainers who carefully promote junior players. These play in the age categories U21, U18, U16 and U15 in the respective top national leagues. The team won the double in the year 2002 in the one-time U17 category. A number of junior players go on to complete football traineeships at FC Basel. This course focuses equally on a football-related as well as a business-studies curriculum.
The FC Basel's annual budget is currently in the region of CHF 25 million, rising to about CHF 45 million in the wake of the successes in the European Cup.
The fan project Basel
A fan project was founded in Basel on 1 January 2003. This offers the fans of FC Basel and EHC Basel (Dragons) a range of fan-related and social services. The project is designed actively to promote a positive supporters' culture, and to support and encourage preventative work with young fans.
Key successes of FC Basel
- Swiss championship title: 1953, 1967, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1977, 1980, 2002, 2004, 2005
- Swiss cup victories: 1933, 1947, 1963, 1967, 1975, 2002, 2003
- Swiss cup finalists: 1942, 1944, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1982
- Swiss league cup victories: 1972
- Finalist UIC: 2001
- Alpine Cup victories; 1969, 1970
Source text: FC Basel
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