Chapter 8 – Winter Settles In

The snow arrived properly sometime during the second week of December and, once it settled across Graubünden, the entire canton seemed to grow quieter overnight.

From the apartment window in the old town, I could see the roofs around Chur carrying fresh snow each morning before the streets below slowly filled with movement again. Delivery vans crept through narrow roads cautiously while café owners swept pathways clear with broad wooden brushes that looked unchanged from another century. The Christmas markets appeared gradually beneath strings of yellow light and pine garlands, and by late afternoon the centre of the city filled with visitors moving between food stalls holding cups of mulled wine against the cold.

The season itself seemed to slow alongside the weather.

By then, however, Chur were winning again with such consistency that it became difficult to remember how unstable the autumn had once felt. Since the scrappy victory against FC Winterthur back in September, the team had gone unbeaten in sixteen consecutive league matches, winning nine in a row heading into the winter break. What had looked like a collapsing title defence only weeks earlier now resembled another championship challenge entirely. By Christmas, Chur sat level on points with FC Basel and BSC Young Boys at the top of the table.

What interested me most was how little triumph there seemed to be around the club itself.

The victories were acknowledged rather than celebrated. Training remained intense. Arriola corrected mistakes with the same impatience whether the team had won three consecutive games or ten. Players still emerged from matches discussing positional details and missed opportunities rather than momentum or confidence. The atmosphere around the club carried satisfaction occasionally, but rarely comfort.

Perhaps that explained the consistency.

Winter changed the practical rhythms of the season too. Training sessions increasingly moved indoors whenever the weather became too severe, particularly during weeks without travel. The indoor facility beside the main pitch filled constantly with the sounds of boots against polished flooring, tactical discussions echoing around enclosed spaces, and analysts replaying video clips against projector screens while players completed recovery work nearby. Outside, snow gathered heavily against the fences around the training ground until the pitches themselves seemed isolated from the rest of the city.

The club felt physically enclosed by winter.

There were days when travelling beyond Graubünden became genuinely difficult, especially once snowstorms intensified higher in the mountains. Yet the isolation appeared to strengthen the relationship between the town and the club rather than weaken it. Chur became busier throughout December as holidaymakers passed through the canton returning from St. Moritz and other Alpine resorts, but the atmosphere within the city itself remained deeply local. Families filled the markets each evening. Restaurants grew louder. Everywhere there were small reminders of how old many of the traditions around Christmas in Graubünden still were.

The players participated in almost all of it.

One afternoon shortly before the winter break, the squad spent several hours moving through the old town alongside local volunteers during a Christmas celebration organised jointly between the club and the city. There was no visible attempt to transform the event into marketing or spectacle. Players simply spoke with supporters, served food, signed shirts for children, and stood drinking coffee beside market stalls while snow continued falling steadily around them.

What struck me was how ordinary the interactions seemed.

At clubs of greater size, these events often carry the atmosphere of obligation or controlled performance. Chur still behaved like an institution genuinely woven into the daily life of the canton. That remained true despite the changing composition of the squad itself. Only three locally born players now remained regularly connected to the first team: Josua Testoni, Giuliano Graf, and Marcos Lima. Yet the emotional connection between club and community appeared undiminished.

If anything, success had made the town more protective of the team.

Inside the squad, however, there were signs of strain accumulating beneath the results. Several departures during the winter period had left the first-team group thinner than before. Ilan Assongo and Martí Puigvert both moved on permanently, while Paupol Nsingi departed as part of a deal viewed internally as financially important for the club’s future. Joseph Ballo left on loan after another difficult period interrupted by injury and stalled development.

Externally, questions emerged almost immediately.

Supporters and journalists began wondering whether Iñaki Arriola had become overly stubborn in his squad management, too reliant upon specific players and reluctant to rotate or trust younger options fully. Internally, the club refused to engage publicly with any of the speculation, though the silence itself occasionally seemed to intensify the rumours.

At the centre of much of the tension sat Valerio Christen.

By winter, Christen was no longer training consistently with the first team following several months of visible emotional and physical exhaustion. It became increasingly understood around the club that he wanted to leave Chur, though not everyone approved of how he had handled the situation privately. Arriola refused entirely to discuss internal matters whenever asked directly, but several people around the club hinted quietly that the manager had been deeply disappointed by Christen’s professionalism during the difficult spell.

There was sadness around the situation more than anger.

At the same time, the emergence of Marco Dreßler and Marcos Lima had transformed the emotional trajectory of the season. Both teenagers seemed to grow stronger as the demands increased. Dreßler entered the winter break with eleven goals and three assists across all competitions, while Lima had contributed ten goals himself despite beginning the season as little more than a promising academy prospect unexpectedly thrust into senior football.

Watching them together in training became one of the most interesting parts of daily life around the club. Dreßler carried himself with the calm confidence of someone slowly realising he belonged at this level, while Lima still retained flashes of youthful uncertainty beneath the goals and growing reputation. Yet both appeared shaped by the environment around them. Older players corrected them constantly. Staff demanded accountability without softening expectations because of age.

The developmental culture Arriola had spent years building remained visible everywhere.

If anything, the manager himself seemed more obsessive than at any previous stage since my arrival in Graubünden. Staff members told me he was arriving earlier at the training ground and leaving later than ever before. His family reportedly worried privately about how intensely he had thrown himself into the season after the disastrous opening months. There were evenings when lights remained visible in the analysis rooms long after the rest of the facility had emptied completely.

And yet the obsession appeared to sharpen him rather than consume him, at least outwardly.

One afternoon during an indoor tactical session, I watched Arriola stop play repeatedly to adjust pressing distances by no more than a metre at a time while players recycled the same movements again and again. Nobody complained. Nobody disengaged. The room carried the concentration of a workshop rather than a football session.

Still unresolved beneath everything was the tactical question that had hovered around Chur since autumn: whether Arriola would eventually return to the more experimental three-at-the-back defensive structure abandoned earlier in the season. The issue surfaced constantly in Swiss media coverage and supporter discussion, partly because the team’s improved form had coincided directly with the return to a more stable back four. Some believed the experimentation had nearly derailed the entire campaign. Others remained convinced Arriola would revisit the idea eventually once confidence returned fully.

The uncertainty surrounding the squad extended beyond tactics too. Transfer links now involved significantly larger figures than before. Chur were no longer discussing free transfers and low-risk loans exclusively. Rumours connected the club with players valued at four and five million euros, numbers that would once have seemed unimaginable in Graubünden.

And yet AlpenPARK itself remained exactly the same.

Even during European nights, the stadium looked tiny compared to the arenas surrounding elite football elsewhere across the continent. Less than ten thousand supporters packed into steep stands beneath the mountains while larger clubs across Europe played inside stadiums capable of swallowing Chur’s entire support several times over. Somehow the contrast only seemed to deepen the intimacy surrounding the place rather than diminish it.

By Christmas, I found myself thinking increasingly about home.

Part of it came from the season itself. Watching players spend time with their families around the club during the holidays stirred a kind of homesickness I had managed mostly to avoid since leaving America. The cold weather contributed too. There were evenings walking back through the old town when the snow, the lights, and the closeness of family life around me made the distance from my own family feel suddenly much larger than it had earlier in the year.

At the same time, I realised there were aspects of my previous life I did not miss at all. I did not miss the endless cycle of deadlines and editorial urgency that had gradually hollowed journalism out for me long before I left it behind. Yet observing Arriola and the players throughout winter, I began understanding something I had not fully appreciated before: pressure feels fundamentally different when attached to work people genuinely love.

Preparation becomes meaningful rather than draining. Urgency develops naturally.

That distinction stayed with me through the final days before the winter break arrived. Chur had recovered completely from the collapse threatening them earlier in the season and once again looked capable of competing at the top of Swiss football. Yet the atmosphere surrounding the club remained strangely restrained, as though everyone understood how fragile momentum could become once the matches returned after winter.

Outside, snow continued falling steadily across Graubünden, sealing the canton temporarily away from much of the outside world.

Inside Chur, there was warmth, momentum, and growing belief, but also a quiet melancholy beneath it all that I struggled fully to explain, even to myself.