Swift Hesperange won their first BGL Ligue title in their history with two games to spare and will find themselves playing UEFA Champions League football come the summer. But how did this club reach the top merely three years after getting promoted? For more questions and explanations, you might find this lowdown helpful.
Swift Hesperange is by no means an unknown team in Luxembourgish football. Founded in 1916, they have accumulated 548 matches in the highest division, with varying success. They also have a piece of silverware to show for, in 1989/90 Coupe de Luxembourg, where they put no fewer than seven goals past Differdange in the final’s rematch.
Despite all of the above, if we travelled back five years in time and tried to predict the outcome of this BGL Ligue season, not many would have picked Swift as the winners. Maybe the majority wouldn’t even have picked them to be playing in the first tier by 2023. That season five years ago ended with Hesperange finishing 18 points off the promotion places in the Ehrenpromotioun. Yet, here we are now, with European football knocking at Stade Alphonse Théis’ gates for the third time since Hesper’s foundation. But what happened in the meantime? How did we get here so quickly?
Structured investment
This story arguably dates back until 2019, when Hesperange were still playing second-division football. Enter one of the commune’s most famous inhabitants, who just happened to have some spare money to invest.
Luxembourgish-Italian businessman Flavio Becca grew up in the town of Hesperange as a football fan and started investing in the newly-merged F91 Dudelange in the 1990s, reaching roaring success over time and building a historic powerhouse of Luxembourgish football in the process.
The heights of his achievements at F91 were consecutive group-stage participation for the first time in the country’s history in 2018/19 and 2019/20. Despite the steady progress towards a sustainable model, he stopped financing them afterwards.
Instead, in 2019, he went and gained ownership of the team of his youth, Swift Hesperange, alongside sponsoring Belgian club RE Virton through his energy drink company Leopard. It wasn’t long before success started to come.
Their first season under new ownership coincided with the strangest season in global football, as March 15 started a several-month halt where all decision-makers in the sport had to come up with the most sensible solution after the COVID-19-enforced lockdown. In Luxembourg, that meant expanding the National Division from 14 to 16 teams, keeping promotion but ditching relegation for a year. That meant Hesperange, momentarily at the top of the league alongside Wiltz 71, were able to make the step up.
Encouraged by the success, they immediately bolstered their squad with options capable of playing at the highest level. They tied down experienced BGL Ligue players or talents from abroad with professional contracts, which are still a rarity in the country. Current manager Pascal Carzaniga's first stint as manager at the club also began in 2020, as the Frenchman was tasked with building a cohesive unit from an exciting crop of players.
And Carzaniga made it make sense. Led by (now Madagascar international) Hakim Abdallah and Dominik Stolz, Hesperange challenged the big guns and found themselves in a three-way title race before long. Sadly, that story didn't get a happy ending just yet, as Carzaniga's first loss with Hesper came in the final round of the season and resulted in them being overtaken by Dudelange. They finished three points off champions Fola.
The podium was still enough to provide European football, though, for the first time since that ominous 1990 cup win. That tie ended with a 0-6 aggregate defeat to Legia Warsaw, while this year they did put up a fight, going out in a narrow second-leg loss against Slovenian opponents Domzale after drawing the first leg.
There was a managerial change too, since Carzaniga left after the third place finish and was replaced by Vincent Hognon, who lasted eight games before being sacked. The rest of the 2021/22 season was then overseen by Aniello Parisi.
Building on ever-collapsing foundations was always going to be hard for Parisi, who lost influential Abdallah, Nicolas Perez and Emmanuel Françoise in the summer and had to build a new core of the squad on arrivals Mehdi Terki, Rayan Philippe or Clément Couturier. The squad took time to gel, and although they didn't race for the title this time around, they did maintain a push for second place.
That ambition of theirs was ended when even a win in the last matchday didn't prove enough, getting them a fourth place finish instead, two points off second. And bad luck came in threes this time: after losing the battle for the podium, Racing FCUL won the Luxembourgish Cup by beating Dudelange, thus stealing the last European qualifier spot right from under Hesper's noses. This was followed by coach Parisi's decision to step down and return to his homeland Italy for the 2022/23 season.
And that is how we got to the point where this ambitious – and by no means penniless – club, deprived of European football, went on and bought further key players to bring their squad depth to no less than 35 players, and poach just about every capable footballer from the lower half of the league. This, beyond the tougher financial situation around Fola Esch and F91 Dudelange meant this was the year it yielded results.
A working tactic
First of all, it didn’t require a masterstroke by Carzaniga to get this team to perform. Having immense quality in all areas, he could focus on building on the team’s strengths: Couturier’s vision and distribution, Stolz’s positioning and finishing, Philippe’s Thierry Henry-esque runs from the left half-space, overlapping runs from the left-back to hold width, and the right-back playing in a more conservative role, supporting the defence.
To supplement this, he could look at what could be exploited against domestic opponents. In a league where play is generally somewhat slow and defenders often lack composure and technique, he introduced a high press, forcing the teams to try risky long balls over the defence in their only attempt to reduce the pressure. Hesper’s high defensive line and goalkeeper Géordan Dupire then had the vision and the passing skill-set to sweep for those long balls and build attacks through midfield.
The result was a team scoring recklessly and catching out any mistakes by opponents. Their 97 goals scored is already the highest tally in league history, beating Fola Esch’s previous record of 89 goals from 2021. Attacker Rayan Philippe is closing in on the highest ever scoring season by François Müller (1956, Grevenmacher), and although the six-goal difference might prove to be a step too far to reach in the remaining two games, Philippe will already certainly manage to stay above one goal per game on average.
The key now is keeping this exceptional squad together in what might be Luxembourg’s best bid to secure a group stage place in Europe for a long time.
UEFA lawsuit
Whatever the standings might show when the curtain falls on 2022/23, Hesper’s European entry may not be straightforward. Notably, the club is involved in a lawsuit against European football’s governing body UEFA.
According to law firm Dupont-Hissel, the UEFA’s current qualification model “condemns all the clubs of all the ‘small’ EU Member States to economic stagnation or regression and therefore to sporting decline.
The club’s board argue Luxembourgish clubs are placed at an economical disadvantage compared to the clubs from the biggest 4 or 5 nations, as the qualification process and the prize money is distributed unfairly.
Hesper also make the point that some of FLF’s rules regarding player trading and employing are outdated and restrict Luxembourgish teams too heavily.
Essentially, Hesper’s problems seem to be having to compete against clubs from their own country. And playing in the competition that they had just won for the first time in their history. However their court case processes, UEFA will surely not give them the warmest reception at their competitions come late July.
