Chapter 3 – The Squad We Built

The dining room overlooked the mountains in a way that almost felt unfair.

Even after several weeks in Graubünden, I still found myself distracted at strange moments by the scale of the landscape surrounding Chur. The restaurant the club used for its pre-season meal sat slightly above the old town, and through the windows behind the players, the last light of evening rested unevenly across the slopes beyond the city. Inside, waiters moved quietly between tables while members of the squad drifted through conversations in German, Spanish, French, and occasionally English, the languages overlapping each other without anyone appearing especially conscious of it.

Iñaki Arriola greeted every journalist personally as we arrived.

Not just politely. Specifically.

He shook hands, repeated names back accurately, asked questions he seemed genuinely interested in hearing answers to, then moved immediately towards another group of players without losing the sense that the interaction had mattered to him. I had begun noticing that quality in him more frequently. The intensity people spoke about around the training ground rarely disappeared off the pitch. It simply redirected itself towards different things.

The players were dressed more formally than I expected for a pre-season gathering. Shirts, jackets, clean shoes. Not extravagant, but deliberate. The atmosphere resembled a large family event more than a professional football function, although the professionalism revealed itself in quieter details. Nutritional staff circulated discreetly around the buffet tables, adjusting portions and discussing meal plans with players individually. Younger academy prospects moved carefully through the room at first, observing before speaking. Nobody appeared uncertain about where they belonged, even when they were clearly still learning how to belong.

I noticed Marcos Lima almost immediately because he looked as though he was trying not to be noticed at all.

The sixteen-year-old striker stood near the edge of the buffet line holding a plate with the concentration of someone afraid to make a mistake publicly. He had recently been promoted into first-team training after dominating at youth level, and although people around the club already spoke about him with the cautious excitement reserved for academy talents who seem capable of altering expectations, in that room he looked unmistakably young. Players passed by greeting him warmly enough, but he answered quietly and rarely initiated conversation himself.

At one point, backup goalkeeper Kerim Amsler walked over, took the plate from his hands briefly, added more food to it, then handed it back while saying something that caused Marcos to laugh for the first time all evening.

Amsler seemed to move through the squad that way constantly.

He was not one of the club’s central figures publicly, not the player supporters sang about or journalists focused on after matches, yet several younger players gravitated towards him naturally throughout the evening. He checked on people without making the act of checking visible. By the time dessert arrived, I had watched him speak separately with Marcos Lima, Marco Dreßler, Joseph Ballo, and one of the analysts working near the back of the room.

The structure of the squad revealed itself slowly through moments like that.

There were five players from Graubünden currently integrated into the first-team environment, each carrying a slightly different relationship with the club itself. Giuliano Graf represented the clearest version of the ideal Chur liked presenting to the outside world: local boy, academy graduate, still central to the team years after climbing with them through the divisions. Others occupied less symbolic but equally important roles within the ecosystem surrounding the squad. Joseph Ballo, recovering from a shin injury that had already complicated plans for another loan move, arrived on crutches but still spent most of the evening joking with academy staff and younger players.

The room shifted fluidly between cultural groups without becoming divided by them.

The Swiss players moved easily between German and Spanish. The French contingent remained slightly closer together early in the evening, with new signing Gael Bruneteau spending long stretches in conversation with Kylian Papon while the two switched naturally into French whenever discussions became more animated. Martí Puigvert appeared almost permanently in motion, floating between tables and repeatedly checking on players who had arrived from abroad over recent years.

Watching him, I began understanding how older players often sustain clubs in ways that tactical systems alone cannot.

Then there was Xabier Jenkinson.

He carried himself with the relaxed confidence of someone who understood immediately how to occupy a room without dominating it aggressively. Tall, composed, impossibly comfortable in conversation, he moved from journalist to journalist answering questions with the same steady optimism regardless of subject. At no point did he sound rehearsed exactly, but there was an ease to him that suggested he understood visibility as part of his role now.

Across the room, Francisco Teixido looked similarly noticeable for entirely different reasons.

The bleach-blond hair made him visible immediately, but the charisma people around the club had already referenced became clearer the longer the evening continued. He spoke with his hands constantly, laughed loudly, and somehow managed to appear fully integrated into the group despite this being one of his first genuine social settings with many of the players outside football itself.

The contrast between Teixido and Imanol Garcia interested me more.

Garcia, another Basque influence within the squad, spent much of the evening speaking quietly with small groups rather than moving across the room socially. When he did talk, people listened carefully. There was a calmness to him that reminded me immediately of Arriola, not stylistically but emotionally. The same measured voice. The same sense that intensity existed beneath the surface rather than needing to announce itself constantly.

At one stage during dinner, I watched Florian Fromlowitz challenge a comment made by one of the fitness coaches strongly enough that several nearby conversations stopped briefly. He wasn’t disrespectful exactly, but there was a volatility to him that contrasted sharply with the emotional control emphasised everywhere else inside the club. People later described him as fiercely ambitious, occasionally confrontational, and sometimes difficult after poor performances or interrupted training sessions.

Arriola corrected him publicly during training more than any other player I had seen.

Yet Fromlowitz also trained with a visible desperation that made the tension understandable. He wanted to become something larger than his previous career had allowed him to become, and Chur, perhaps unfairly, increasingly looked like a place where reinvention might actually be possible.

That idea hovered over several members of the squad.

The club’s success had clearly altered the atmosphere around them, even if nobody openly admitted it. Newspaper speculation followed players now. Supporters waited outside training grounds with cameras. Rumours of transfers circulated constantly enough that absences from sessions generated immediate conversation. A few players seemed more guarded in public than they had apparently been before the title-winning season.

And yet much of the internal culture appeared unchanged.

After training sessions, players still ate together regularly at the club restaurant. Families used the recovery and leisure facilities connected to the training complex almost like a community centre. Children moved freely through spaces many professional clubs would now isolate completely behind security barriers and media protocols. Players remained outside speaking with supporters long after sessions finished.

Nobody at Chur behaved as though access itself had become a commodity.

That struck me repeatedly.

The more time I spent around the club, the less the squad resembled a conventional football structure and the more it resembled a community trying to protect itself from becoming one. Recruitment appeared tied as much to personality as ability. Every player I spoke with eventually returned to the same themes without prompting: responsibility, humility, development, belonging.

Sometimes they even used identical language.

Arriola’s influence remained visible even in his absence. Players corrected each other during small-sided games with the same calm specificity he used himself. Younger players repeated phrases about emotional control and collective responsibility almost word for word from previous interviews I had heard him give. The ideology of the club had travelled downward and outward until it existed independently of the manager’s physical presence.

Whether that made the culture sustainable or dangerously dependent on one man, I still couldn’t tell.

Late in the evening, I found myself watching Giuliano Graf speaking with several academy players near the back of the room. Chur-born. Academy graduate. Still here after the rise from the fourth tier. He did not carry himself like the squad’s biggest star, yet younger players seemed to observe him constantly, consciously or not. There was an ease to his relationship with the club that nobody imported from elsewhere could fully replicate.

He looked rooted in the place itself.

Outside, the mountains had disappeared into darkness by the time people began leaving. The room emptied gradually rather than suddenly, players lingering in small groups while staff collected glasses and folded table settings around them. I stood near the entrance for a while watching conversations continue in different languages beneath the low lighting of the restaurant, and it occurred to me that Chur’s greatest achievement might not have been assembling a successful team at all.

It might have been convincing people from completely different places that they were building something shared.

Still, even then, the fragility underneath it all remained difficult to ignore.

Several important players were entering the final stages of their careers. Younger talents carried expectations that grew heavier with every successful season. The academy pathway supporters celebrated so proudly would inevitably become harder to sustain as standards rose further. Around the edges of the room, behind the warmth and professionalism and visible togetherness, I occasionally sensed something else too: an awareness that football rarely allows communities like this to remain unchanged for very long.

And watching the squad drift slowly out into the night, I found myself wondering again whether everyone inside Chur understood that already, or whether they were still trying not to think about it.