Chapter 10 – The Weight of Spring

After the Servette match, nobody left quickly.

People stayed in their seats or stood in the aisles with their hands in their coat pockets while the players disappeared down the tunnel one by one. The stadium announcer thanked the supporters over the speakers, first in German, then in Romansh. A few children waited near the front barrier with shirts and pens, though most of the players did not come back out.

It had snowed during the morning but turned to rain by kickoff. By the end of the match the corners of the pitch were dark and heavy and the ball held up whenever passes travelled across the wings. Chur lost 2–0 and barely created anything. I wrote “pedestrian” in my notebook during the second half and underlined it twice.

The crowd had been loud before kickoff. Less so after halftime.

The week before, Chur had drawn 1–1 away to FC Luzern. Before that there had been the draw with Yverdon-Sport FC. The Basel defeat still hung over everything too. Nobody around the club spoke about the run directly anymore. Players answered questions carefully after matches and left quickly afterwards.

One local journalist asked Arriola after the Servette game whether the team looked mentally tired.

“No,” he said. “Just not good enough tonight.”

He scratched at the side of his beard while the translator repeated the answer in German.

The press conference lasted less than six minutes.

Outside AlpenPARK, supporters moved slowly back towards the tram stops and car parks. Two boys kicked an empty paper cup between themselves along the pavement while their father walked several metres ahead without speaking. A woman in a Chur scarf stopped near the club shop window and looked at the league table displayed on a television inside. Young Boys had two games in hand. Basel were above them now too. Nobody seemed angry. That was what stayed with me. In October people sounded frustrated because the team was losing. In March they sounded worried because the team looked ordinary.

A few days later I drove towards the training ground just after seven in the morning. Snow still covered the smaller pitches behind the indoor hall and several academy players were already outside carrying mini goals across the frozen grass. The first-team players arrived gradually over the next half hour, most alone, some with coffee cups balanced in one hand while they checked their phones with the other.

Nobody looked especially tense. That surprised me too.

Training remained almost exactly the same as it had during the winning run in winter. Arriola still stopped drills constantly. Still repositioned players by hand. Still corrected angles and distances and body shapes in the same calm voice that rarely became louder no matter how frustrated he appeared. At one point during a defensive exercise he pulled Florian Fromlowitz aside and physically walked him through the movement again, placing him two metres narrower before restarting the sequence. Fromlowitz nodded without speaking and repeated the drill immediately. Earlier in the season he might have argued. The session lasted nearly two hours. Afterwards most of the players stayed inside rather than leaving immediately. Recovery groups moved between the gym and cafeteria while staff carried laptops and tactical boards between offices upstairs. Kylian Papon sat alone near the far window scrolling through his phone for nearly twenty minutes before eventually joining the others.

A journalist from Zürich approached him near the exit and asked about transfer interest from Saudi Arabia. Papon stopped walking but did not answer immediately.

“I’m here,” he said eventually.

The journalist asked another question. Papon rubbed at his forehead, looked towards the car park and repeated himself.

“I’m here.”

Then he walked away.

Later that afternoon I spoke briefly with one of the club officials I had gotten to know during the season. We sat near the reception area while two volunteers decorated part of the wall for an upcoming youth tournament. She told me Arriola had not been spending as much time at the training ground recently.

“He used to stay here all day,” she said. “Sometimes all night.”

I asked if she thought that was a good thing.

She shrugged.

“I don’t know anymore.”

There were other conversations happening around the club too. Sponsorship talks. Concerns about qualifying for the Champions League again. Rumours that Semir Chiesa might not stand again when his term as chairman ended. The club had grown too quickly over the last few years for those discussions not to matter now.

The strange thing was how normal everything still looked from outside.

Driving through Chur, I still saw players stopping outside bakeries and cafés in the old town. I saw staff carrying shopping bags through the centre after training. One afternoon I watched Giuliano Graf help an elderly man push his car out from a snowbank near the cathedral before heading towards the stadium himself.

Nothing about the club physically resembled what people elsewhere now thought it had become.

I met Ana Arriola properly around this time. She worked upstairs above one of the indoor pitches in a narrow office filled with screens, whiteboards and stacks of printed reports. Through the glass behind her desk you could see academy players training below on artificial turf while snow hit the roof overhead. She spoke quickly, moving between English and Spanish depending on the sentence.

“At bigger clubs,” she told me, “data departments work separately from football people. Here everybody talks.”

She showed me opposition reports, physical data, recruitment models. Some of it looked incredibly sophisticated. Other parts seemed improvised entirely around the club’s needs and limitations. One scout report had handwritten notes in the margins because the printer had failed halfway through. At one point she laughed and apologised for the heating not working properly upstairs.

I stayed there almost three hours. When I left, it was already dark outside.

A few nights later Chur lost again, this time away to Young Boys. I stopped taking notes after the second goal and did not realise for several minutes. Around me the journalists in the press box continued typing while snow drifted beyond the floodlights above the far stand.

On the flight back to Zürich the players sat mostly in silence. Some watched films on tablets. Others slept with headphones on. Arriola spent almost the entire journey speaking quietly with Xavi Tamarit across the aisle, occasionally drawing shapes onto a sheet of paper folded against his knee. At the airport nobody from the club used the main exit. They walked together through a side corridor towards the bus waiting outside in the dark.

By March, the academy players were playing less. The same starting eleven appeared most weeks regardless of form. Chur still sat third. Europe remained possible. But the squad looked thinner now than it had at Christmas and the schedule had not eased.

One evening after training I remained in the stands while the floodlights stayed on over the main pitch. Groundsmen moved slowly across the field repairing worn sections near the penalty areas. Somewhere behind the stand I could hear music coming faintly from the gym.

Eventually Arriola walked out alone carrying a coat over one arm.

Instead of leaving immediately, he sat in his car without turning the engine on. The lights inside the stadium shut off one by one around him until only the parking area remained lit.

He stayed there a long time.