Football Association launches comprehensive online archive on Swiss club football
After nearly ten years of development work in collaboration with the soccer magazine Zwölf and with support from league sponsor Raiffeisen, the time has come: The Swiss Football League is launching SFL Glory, the first online archive dedicated to Swiss soccer, which covers every match in the top league since 1933.
Who has scored the most goals in the top Swiss league since the National League was founded in 1933? Which coach has trained the most clubs? And who has made the most appearances as a player overall? Football fans and nostalgics can now find answers to all these and many other questions at Sfl.ch/glory reliable answers for the first time.
Reference book for all football fans
"SFL Glory invites football fans on a journey through time through the highest Swiss league since the 1933/34 season," says SFL CEO Claudius Schäfer, explaining: "For the first time in history, all seasons, matches, players and coaches since the first regular National League season have been researched and recorded in close cooperation with the football magazine Zwölf and supported by league sponsor Raiffeisen." The result is the official and freely accessible reference work on the history of Swiss club football at the highest level. The website was realized with online partner Koch - Agentur für Kommunikation.
"SFL Glory is a counter-design to the transient and short-lived world stage of football," says Roger Müller, Media & Marketing Officer of the Swiss Football League, who launched the project over ten years ago. Since then, three databases have been merged, well over 16,000 players have been recorded and around 4 million data records have been created.
1933: A logical starting point
But club football has been played in Switzerland since the end of the 19th century. Why does SFL Glory only go back to 1933? "The 1933/34 season was the first unified championship to be held throughout Switzerland, back then with 16 teams," explains Philippe Guggisberg, Head of Communications at the SFL and head of the research team. "It therefore marks the beginning of the national Swiss championship as we know it today."
There is still a lot to do
The basic version 1.0 of SFL Glory focuses on the so-called all-time statistics. The user has the option of displaying all championship tables and retrieving data on players and coaches. The data is supplemented with stories and anecdotes from the various eras. Philippe Guggisberg announces that this is just the beginning: "SFL Glory has a practically infinite number of stories that can be discovered behind the numbers. In the future, it will be possible to call up even more information, for example a profile of every player who has played in the National League or Super League since 1933, or the individual telegrams of all matches. We have only just begun to tell the story."
