PASS began at the moment FC Chur stopped being simply a football club and became something larger within Graubünden itself.

Over the previous decade, Chur had risen from the lower reaches of Swiss football into the Swisscom Super League under Iñaki Arriola, building a reputation for tactical intelligence, youth development and a stubborn attachment to regional identity at a time when much of European football drifted toward uniformity. Daniel R. Mercer’s bestselling book The View From The Top documented that ascent in extraordinary detail, following Arriola’s obsessive standards, the growth of the academy and the transformation of the club from provincial outsiders into one of the most fascinating institutions in Swiss football.

But as Chur grew, there was a feeling around the city that the story risked becoming simplified elsewhere. Too often, the club was framed as a miracle, a surprise, a temporary disruption to the established order. Inside Graubünden, people understood it differently. They saw the years of planning behind the rise, the relationship between the club and the canton, the way football had slowly embedded itself into everyday life around the mountains, railway lines and multilingual communities of the region.

Published every two months by FC Chur, PASS was created to document that deeper story properly.

Edited by Leandro Caduff and designed by Mara Deplazes, the magazine treats football as part of civic and cultural life rather than pure entertainment. Inspired by long-form journals like The Blizzard, each issue moves between tactics, geography, supporter culture, regional politics, architecture, sustainability and identity, asking what a football club can mean to the people around it.

Its name comes from the Alpine passes cutting through Graubünden: routes connecting isolated places through difficult terrain. That idea sits at the centre of the magazine itself.

Together, they ask a larger question that sits beneath every edition:

What responsibility should a football club have to the place that created it?