Chapter 11 – The Split Season

By the time the snow started disappearing properly from the streets around Chur, people had stopped speaking about the title in the same casual way they had during winter. The optimism had not vanished exactly. It had just become quieter and more conditional, folded into conversations rather than leading them. At cafés around the old town, supporters still discussed league tables over coffee and cigarettes, though now there were pauses between sentences where there had once only been certainty. Construction work had begun around the south end of AlpenPARK and the sound of drills and reversing trucks carried across the neighbourhood most mornings, mixing with the church bells and the noise from the river as the thaw set in properly across Graubünden. Tourists had started returning too, stopping overnight on the way back from St. Moritz or Davos, and there were afternoons where the town felt fuller than it had during winter, yet somehow more distracted at the same time.

The season itself had begun to feel like that as well. Full, but distracted.

Chur drew 1–1 away against Grasshopper Club Zürich in a match that nobody seemed capable of remembering clearly afterwards, which often says more about a team than a dramatic defeat ever can. They controlled long stretches of possession without ever really controlling the game itself and conceded from the kind of transition Arriola had spent entire weeks trying to eliminate during training. Three days later they travelled to FC Basel and lost again, 2–1 this time, despite taking the lead early through Marcos Lima. The away end remained loud throughout the second half but the atmosphere around the players afterwards felt different than it had earlier in the season. Nobody looked angry. Nobody even looked shocked. Players sat in the dressing room afterwards staring down at phones or treatment tables while staff moved quietly around them collecting GPS vests and half-empty bottles. It resembled exhaustion more than disappointment.

By April, exhaustion had become visible everywhere around the club if you spent enough time there. Training sessions were shorter now and often began later in the morning. Players arrived with tape already wrapped around knees and ankles before even entering the dressing room and the physio department remained busy almost permanently. Recovery bikes lined the corridor outside the gym because there was no room left inside for them. Meals lasted longer because players moved more slowly between rooms. Even the media duties had changed. Interviews became shorter. Fewer jokes. Fewer players stopping naturally to talk after training. At the beginning of the season it often felt as though the entire squad remained around the facility because they enjoyed it there. Now it felt more like they simply did not have the energy to go elsewhere.

Marco Dreßler, though, seemed to be growing into the pressure rather than shrinking from it. He had recently won the NxGN award and while the announcement created excitement externally, inside the club it mostly produced a kind of quiet satisfaction, as though people felt validated rather than surprised. One morning I arrived at the training ground just after sunrise and found him already outside near the indoor pitch, headphones on, repeatedly striking a ball against the concrete wall and controlling the rebound before it touched the floor. He barely acknowledged me when I walked past. During the session itself Arriola stopped a finishing exercise midway through and physically moved Dreßler less than a metre to the left before restarting the drill. Nothing else changed. Same cross. Same run. Same movement from the defenders. Dreßler scored three times in the next few minutes from almost the exact position Arriola had walked him towards. Watching it from the touchline, I found myself thinking about how many of the club’s ideas depended on details small enough that most people in a stadium would never notice them at all.

Oscar looked less certain. Since returning from his loan spell in Germany he had carried himself differently around the training ground, more detached somehow, though not in an arrogant way. He still spoke politely to supporters and younger players but there were afternoons where he seemed to drift through the building without really settling anywhere. One day after lunch he sat alone near the back window of the cafeteria while academy scholars crowded noisily around another table discussing youth league fixtures and upcoming exams. I asked him later whether Germany had changed him and he smiled for a moment before answering. “I think it showed me how unusual this place is,” he said. “You leave and realise most clubs don’t work like this.” He did not elaborate much further than that. The answer stayed with me anyway.

Travel became easier once the roads cleared and daylight stretched later into the evenings. During winter, away trips often felt claustrophobic, with players sleeping beneath jackets while buses crawled through snow-covered valleys on the way back from Zürich or Bern. Now the curtains remained open and conversations drifted more freely through the aisles. But the physical fatigue remained obvious. After the defeat in Basel several players slept almost the entire journey home while the staff watched clips from the game on laptops balanced against their knees. Arriola remained awake near the front beside Xavi Tamarit, pausing footage repeatedly to discuss positioning during defensive transitions. The light from the screen reflected across his face every few seconds and made him look older than he had when I first arrived in Graubünden.

In quieter moments around the training ground, people had started mentioning his appearance too. His hair remained uncombed more often now and the neatness that once characterised him had slipped slightly as the season dragged on. He still arrived before everyone else but no longer absurdly early. Some mornings members of staff reached the building first and looked momentarily surprised when they did. Ana told me this always happened eventually. We were sitting upstairs above the indoor training hall while youth players worked through passing drills below us and rain hammered against the roof hard enough to interrupt conversation every few minutes. “He spirals,” she said eventually. “Not emotionally in the dramatic sense. He just obsesses over details and stops taking care of the simple things.” She spoke about him with the familiarity of somebody who had watched the same cycle repeat itself for years. Eating properly. Sleeping. Resting. Shaving. Calling people back. “The more pressure he feels,” she said, “the narrower his world becomes.”

A few days later, during an open training session, one of the supporters standing near the barrier arrived carrying two takeaway coffees and handed one directly to Arriola during a break in drills. Security around the club remained almost non-existent despite everything that had changed over recent seasons and supporters still stood only a few metres from the sessions most mornings. Arriola recognised the man immediately, embraced him briefly and continued talking through the exercise while holding the coffee cup in one hand. The supporter stayed there afterwards watching training quietly beside academy parents and pensioners wrapped in scarves despite the spring rain. I remember thinking then that the emotional distance between club and community had become almost impossible to measure properly anymore. People spoke about Chur as though it were a football team but often behaved as though it were a neighbourhood responsibility.

I realised around this point that I had stopped behaving like a journalist entirely. During a youth event at AlpenPARK the academy scholars organised photographs with supporters outside the stadium before kickoff and, without thinking much about it, I joined the queue with everyone else instead of entering through the media gate. One of the club staff laughed when she noticed me standing there holding my notebook beneath my arm like everyone else holding shirts and autograph cards. “You know you don’t have to queue,” she said. I stayed where I was anyway. At some point over the previous months I had stopped seeing access as the thing I valued most.

By the end of the regular season Chur sat fourth with sixty points. Seventeen wins. Nine draws. Seven defeats. Forty-seven goals scored. Twenty-eight conceded. BSC Young Boys led the table comfortably while Servette FC and Basel remained above Chur too. Under almost any normal circumstances the season would still have been considered exceptional. Yet after the standards of the previous year, and after the long unbeaten run during winter, the mood around the club carried traces of disappointment that nobody seemed fully comfortable admitting out loud.

After the final match before the championship split, I remained inside AlpenPARK long after most people had left. The floodlights had already been switched off across half the stadium and the construction work around the south stand sat silent for once beneath the evening rain. Down near the benches, two members of staff folded training bibs carefully into plastic crates while groundsmen repaired sections of turf near the penalty area. Neither job appeared urgent. Both were carried out with the same quiet precision they would have shown in July or January or any other point of the season. Watching them from high in the stand, I remember thinking how strange it was that football clubs continue functioning through fatigue in exactly the same way people do.