FC Thun are champions of Switzerland. The achievement has arrived in their first season back in the top flight, a detail that places their title win in rare company and has prompted, as the Guardian reports this week, serious debate about where it sits in the wider canon of improbable league victories.
The comparison most readily drawn is with Leicester City's Premier League triumph of 2016, still the benchmark against which romantic upsets are measured. The Guardian's analysis, however, suggests Thun's achievement may surpass it in at least one significant respect: Leicester, for all the improbability of their run, were not freshly promoted when they lifted the trophy. Thun were. To win a championship in the same season you have returned to the top division is a different kind of feat — it collapses the usual assumption that a promoted side's first priority is mere survival.
Swiss football does not carry the financial weight of the Premier League, and that context matters when making comparisons. The structural gap between a newly promoted Swiss club and the established forces in their league is not the same as the chasm Leicester bridged in England. Thun's resources, their squad depth, their pull in the transfer market — none of these are documented in detail by the current wire reports. What is clear is that they have won, that it was unexpected, and that the football world has taken notice.
The Guardian's piece also addresses Wrexham's trajectory, pairing the two stories under a broader question about football's capacity for unlikely narratives. Wrexham, backed by their Hollywood ownership, have attracted sustained international attention during their own rise through the English football pyramid. The question of what comes next for the Welsh club — and, as the Guardian frames it, for the figure of Michael Carrick — sits alongside the Thun story as part of a wider conversation about ambition, momentum, and the difficulty of sustaining improbable ascents.
Carrick's role in this context is not spelled out further in the available reporting, and Touchline will not speculate on specifics the wire does not provide. What both stories share is a preoccupation with the moment after the fairy tale: the point at which a club that has overperformed must decide what kind of institution it wants to become. For Thun, that question arrives immediately, with a European campaign presumably now on the horizon. For Wrexham, it is a question that has been building across several consecutive promotions.
Foot-of-the-table survival and top-of-the-table triumph are, in their own ways, equally disorienting for clubs unaccustomed to either. The Swiss champions will spend the coming weeks absorbing what they have done. Whether they can build on it, or whether this season stands as a singular moment in their history, is a question that will take years rather than months to answer.