Welcome to Nyon: UEFA’s picturesque lakeside football town

What’s the home of UEFA’s HQ like? In a word: unassuming.

If you were driving between Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland’s second- and fourth-largest cities, you might pass through or at least see signs for Nyon. It is a small municipality north east of Geneva, located on the banks of Lac Leman (Lake Geneva) in the Francophone west side of Switzerland.

Little over a mile from ‘centre ville’, the road bisects UEFA’s headquarters and the Colovray Sports Centre. Its location belies the significance and reputation of UEFA. With the men’s Champions League and European Championship, they boast the most watched continental club and international tournaments in the world; eight of the top 10 men’s and six of the top 10 women’s FIFA ranked nations are in the UEFA confederation; UEFA committed to investing more than €1billion in development projects over the past four years.

They are not the kind of statistics for a governing body that you would expect to find located at the foothills of the Jura mountain range. Mont Tendre, the tallest in that range in Switzerland, is also the country’s highest peak outside of the Alps, with swathes of fields stretching from the mountains down to the lake.

It is a stunning and relevant backdrop for the UEFA Youth League finals, hosted here every season since their inception in 2013-14 — with the exception of last season (2022-23) when they were moved to Geneva to supplement fan demand. The under-19 equivalent of the Champions League is designed to try and develop players for the senior competition, and help bridge the gap to first-team level. Though the ludicrously low professionalisation rates from academies — even at under-19 level — are metaphorically comparable to climbing a mountain.

UEFA, founded in Basel, Switzerland in June 1954, had its offices in Paris for the first six years. Then, after 35 years in the Swiss capital of Bern, they moved 140 kilometres south west to Nyon. Initially, staff worked out of temporary offices while its headquarters were built.

Its ‘campus’ now consists of three modern, minimalistic office buildings that do not exactly match. UEFA’s “House of European Football”, the main administrative building and the oldest of the three, is set back from the road and tucked away on the slope running down to the lake. It is rectangular and mostly glass, with downhill roads on either side. Draws for the continental club competitions (Champions League, Europa League, Conference League, Youth League) and major international tournaments (European Championship) are made here.

UEFA generally have a low-key presence in the town (Soeren Stache/Getty Images)

Across the street are UEFA’s two newer buildings: La Clairiere, opened in 2010, and Bois-Bougy (2012). La Clairiere, which translates from French as ‘the meadow’, is a circular four-storey building and the most prominent. Next to that, Bois-Bougy is long and rectangular, also a four story building but built into the ground with only the top two stories visible.

There is little to no branding on the buildings themselves, adding to the mystique, though lampposts on both sides of the street have Youth League branding and there is a small, singular sign for the “House of European Football”.

“UEFA’s presence in Nyon is a source of pride for our town,” said Daniel Rossellat, mayor of Nyon, in 2020. “There are very important economic benefits as well, given that UEFA is a key provider of jobs for our region”. As of late 2022, UEFA estimated it had around 800 employees in Nyon.

Roughly 800 employees work at UEFA HQ in Nyon (Soeren Stache/Getty Images)

One UEFA employee, talking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, says that number will be at a peak currently because of preparations for the upcoming European Championship.

The Colovray Sports Centre has an athletics track, six grass pitches — some are artificial — and is a multi-sport facility because rugby is played there too. Its proximity to the lake and rural surroundings give little protection against the biting winds that can cut across the pitches.

The show pitch features a stand that holds 860, and steep grass banks on the opposite side, with a capacity of 4,000. When the Youth League semi-finals and finals are here, fans split across different sides of the bank depending on their allegiances, and considering crowd sizes, it makes for a relatively decent atmosphere.

Stade Nyonnais, Nyon’s premier football club, have played their home games there since it opened in 1991. They have spent the past three decades flitting between the second and third divisions, with Nyon’s rugby club markedly more successful.

UEFA’s local football stadium, The Colovray Sports Centre, seats just 860 (Pixsell/MB Media/Getty Images)

The town centre in Nyon is up on a steep hill — the land UEFA purchased to build its headquarters was called ‘La Colline’. Its most notable feature is the castle, dating back to the 13th century and now a Swiss heritage site after being restored in the early 2000s.

In terms of population — 21,192 as of the December 2019 census — Nyon does not even crack the top 30 cities in Switzerland. There is one train station, no metro and 10 bus routes. Lyon, in France, and Turin, in Italy, are within two and four hours by car. It fits the trend of significant footballing institutions being deliberately located in (relatively) remote but accessible areas — one UEFA employee spoke of the “change of pace” living there compared to a major metropolis. Some UEFA employees live across the border in France, just a few kilometres away, where life and property is cheaper.

Chateau de Nyon was built in 1293 (Getty Images)

The FA built St George’s Park, England’s national football centre, in Burton-upon-Trent, a market town, because it is “England-centric, easy to get to from anywhere in the country and very accessible from a number of airports”. They undoubtedly drew inspiration from the French Football Federation’s national centre in Clairefontaine, 50km south west of Paris in the middle of the Rambouillet forest. Coverciano, Italy’s national centre, is in a suburb of Florence.

Those might be training centres for players, rather than administrative hubs (the FAs of England, France and Italy are all based in their capital cities) but there is clearly value placed on a tranquil environment for an organisation that has to make significant decisions and manage 55 member associations. Other major companies have offices or headquarters in Nyon, such as Swiss luxury watchmakers Hublot, which is the Premier League and Champions League timekeeping sponsor and has made the official watch of Euro 2024, having done the same for every edition since the 2008 tournament in Austria and Switzerland.

To understand Nyon, you need to put it in the context of Geneva and Lausanne, two cities almost equidistant from Nyon (about 25 minutes away).

Geneva is grandiose, the most compact metropolis in the world. Trams cut through the middle of wide streets, and it is artistic yet almost domineering with an abundance of high-rise buildings. It has an unavoidable feeling of significance: one of the world’s financial centres, the self-styled “peace capital” in being the home of many agencies of the United Nations and Red Cross, and of course the four Geneva Conventions, international humanitarian laws set out to establish legal standards for humane treatment in war.

Similarly, Lausanne is the “Olympic Capital”, home to the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee and Court of Arbitration for Sport. It hosts the Athletissima, first held in 1977, an annual elite athletics meet which is now a regular in the Diamond League calendar and has been the site of three world records.

Comparatively, Nyon hosts the largest Swiss documentary festival (Visions du Reel) every April and the Paleo rock festival. Really, it is one of the last places you would expect to find UEFA, which is likely why its executives chose to move its HQ there.

Festival-goers gather to watch The Chemical Brothers at Paleo in 2011 (Lionel Flusin/Getty Images)

UEFA has a team that plays in the local amateur Swiss league, and they put on fitness classes. Company five-a-side games are said to be played at a high level — Michel Platini, captain of France when they won the 1984 Euros and UEFA president between January 2007 and December 2015, is rumoured to have featured in these occasionally.

People like to talk of cities coming alive when there is a game on, especially a final. Even with the Youth League finals weekend being tradition now in Nyon, with the semi-finals on a Friday and the final on a Monday, life continues as normal. Exactly how busy the city gets depends on who qualifies (Milan brought a strong following this year), and there is a significant Portuguese diaspora in south-west Switzerland, so Benfica and Porto have been well supported when they made previous finals. In fact, UEFA employees have spoken of it being at its busiest when Everton played Stade Nyonnais in a pre-season friendly last July.

Fans watch Everton’s 2023 friendly against Stades Nyonnais from a bank along the pitch (Tony McArdle/Getty Images)

Perhaps they are desensitised to a decade’s worth of the Youth League and even longer of UEFA being housed there, or that Swiss teams have never done particularly well. Basel, Zurich, Young Boys and Servette have all played in the competition, 15 times collectively, and the best finish was Basel going out at the round-of-16 stage in 2018.

Nyon’s relationship with UEFA and the Youth League was perfectly visualised by one car park close to the train station, with a poster showcasing the final four teams. Next to it, the exact same size, was a poster advertising Stade Nyonnais’ next home game at the weekend. Unassuming.

(Top photos: Getty Images)