With Mohammed Salah as one of their star performers, FC Basel dominated Swiss football between 2010-2018, where they won eight successive championships and three times managed to go beyond the group stages of the Champions League.
But those days are well and truly gone, and today FC Basel is just a shadow of their previous glorious achievements when they tested the might of Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United on four separate occasions.
Since then, two ownerships, management changes, misguided strategies, and questionable decisions at the boardroom level left an undeniable mark on the decline of this once formidable domestic giant, which even came close to bankruptcy.
"FC Basel very surprisingly won the championship last season, but you should see it in the context that while the national team has been doing fine, Swiss domestic football is in a poor state", says Florian Raz.
"Whenever you have two players who can actually string two passes together, they are immediately sold to foreign clubs. At the moment, you have a league which is very entertaining from the fact that everybody beats everybody, but the quality of the league is very poor."
"You can see it from the fact that FC Lugano went out already in the second qualifying round of the Conference League against Romanian outfit Cluj, and the following week they beat FC Basel in the Swiss league", says Raz.
FC Copenhagen head into the encounter rich on confidence, having lost only one game and won seven out of the first nine matches in the new season, while FC Basel are fourth in the Swiss table, having conceded seven goals in four fixtures.
"FC Basel want to play attacking football and press their opponents high up the field, but they don't really have the team to execute that strategy. They don’t score a lot of goals, and their defense, where they look very fragile, is a work in progress. Their defenders, who are young and inexperienced, are not very tall. They play a zone defense, and they don’t have the awareness to play like that."
Despite having a host of offers from clubs outside Switzerland, Xherdan Shaquiri decided to leave Chicago Fire in the summer of 2024 to return home to his mother country in a career that has seen him play for a host of big clubs like Liverpool, Bayern Munich, Internazionale, etc..
Shaquiri was the dominant factor in FC Basel winning the championship last season and is still a key factor in the team, even though he has lost his pace and gets frustrated very quickly, says Raz.
"They are very dangerous from set pieces, which are all handled by Shaquiri, and he still has a magical left foot. But he is quite easy to frustrate. All the teams in the Swiss league man-mark him, and he really hates that. So he argues a lot with the referees and his own team-mates and his body language is usually very poor", says Raz, who has a clear message for Jacob Neestrup, the coach of FC Copenhagen, before the clash on Wednesday night.
"Man-mark Shaquiri, don’t concede stupid free-kicks close to your box and then put a lot of pressure on their defense. Then you will win the match".
FC Basel play host to FC Copenhagen at Skt. Jacob-Park at 21.00 CET.