Founded in , Basel play home games at St. Jakob-Park , which is currently the largest club stadium in Switzerland. In , St. Jakob-Park attracted an average attendance of 23,, [1] making Basel the most highly supported football club in Switzerland. In , Basel competed in the European Cup for the first time, but only reached the first round.
The highest stage Basel ever reached in the competition was in when they reached the quarter-finals before being eliminated by Celtic. FC Basel was started by an advertisement on 12 November that appeared in the Basler national newspaper requesting that a football team be formed and that anyone that wished to join should meet up the following Wednesday at They won the cup again in when they beat Lausanne Sports , who had also been runners-up the previous year, 3β0 in the final at the Stadion Neufeld in Bern.
Basel won their first league title in , with club legend Bader then as player-manager. A cup final victory over Lausanne Sports also came later in the season. This led to Basel qualifying to play in the European Cup , for the first time, in Basel were knocked out of the tournament in the first round, however, by Danish side Akademisk Boldklub. Basel's next league win came in , when they once again finished just one point above the runners-up, who this time were Lausanne Sports.
This meant that Basel could embark on another European adventure, but they, once again, failed to overcome the first hurdle, who were Celtic of Scotland. In the β70 season , Basel won the league by one point over Lausanne, once again. The European Cup was a little kinder to Basel in , as they reached the second round, losing to Ajax , after defeating Soviets Spartak Moscow in the first round. Basel did not retain their title the next season despite finishing with the same number of points as the winners, Grasshopper, who won it on head-to-head.
After a trophy-less season, Basel then won two league titles in-a-row, in and They also won the League Cup in Despite Basel's improvement on the European stage, they did not retain the league for another four years, although they did manage to lift the Swiss Cup in after beating FC Winterthur 2β1 after extra time. Basel's long-awaited title-win came in as they triumphed over Servette FC in a playoff. This meant that Basel returned to play in the European Cup but they were defeated in the first round once more, this time by Wacker Innsbruck of Austria , after showing so much promise on their last European outing.
