The Game Is American, but the View, Alpine

The local team, the Broncos, is a winner, in fact. On a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, while some 300 fans munched ribs and sausages, the red-clad Calanda Broncos, named for a local beer that is a sponsor, trounced the visiting Zurich Renegades, 48-6.

Swiss athletes are known for prowess in skiing, ice hockey and bobsledding — but football? To be sure, it remains a niche sport.

Soccer remains the country’s most popular spectator sport, and ice hockey is No. 2, but fans say that football is probably third, even though it was introduced to Switzerland less than 30 years ago. There are clubs in all the major cities, with senior and junior teams, and even flag football for children and, in a few cases, women.

“All the teams are growing,” said Alex Trost, 35, a project manager in civil engineering who is also president of the Zurich club.

“Maybe it’s exotic, or the American way of life, or just a fascination with the game,” he said on the sidelines before his club’s loss to the Broncos. “It’s a family event. Not like soccer, where the guys go to drink beer.”

The Swiss are latecomers to football, which was played in Germany, France and Italy years before. In fact, it was an Italian, Massimo Monti, a player for a team in Milan, who founded the Lugano Seagulls, Switzerland’s first club, when he moved to that lakeside Swiss town in 1982.

“In the southern part of Switzerland, we saw lots of basketball, but also football on Berlusconi’s channels,” said Dieter Beyeler, 64, who played with Mr. Monti’s Seagulls and now helps run the team, which changed its name to the Lugano Lakers last year. He was referring to the television channels controlled by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and media mogul. In the early days, with no opponents to compete with in Switzerland, Lugano played Italian teams, like the Parma Panthers, he said. Now, the Swiss American Football League has 16 member clubs, including one based just across the border in Austria. (In Switzerland, the sport that Americans call soccer is known by its European names — fussball in German, calcio in Italian — while the American game of football goes by its American name.)

The league’s rules allow teams to employ American coaches, to hone the players’ talents, and each team may list up to six American or Canadian players on its roster and have up to three on the field at any one time.

Greg Conti, 29, played center at Bucknell University and later worked as a construction equipment salesman in his native Pittsburgh before being laid off. A friend told him about European football. Knowing that the rules limited the number of Americans on European clubs’ rosters, he took advantage of his Italian ancestry to apply for and obtain dual Italian and American citizenship. Now he qualifies as an Italian player and does not count against his team’s limit of six Americans.

Each team may have an unlimited number of players from other European countries, though. Indeed, one big name on the Broncos roster this year is Iiro Luoto, a Finnish tight end formerly with the Helsinki Roosters who spent the 2007 season on a practice squad with the New York Jets.

“The foreigners add more spice,” said Thomas Zarinac, who played offensive tackle for the Frankfurt Knights in Germany and is now an assistant coach with Zurich. “They’re what makes the difference.”

The game has been steadily building a fan base in Switzerland, as have the Broncos, the Swiss league’s defending champions. “It’s growing every year,” Mr. Conti said.

Oddly to American eyes, the Swiss play football in the spring, not the fall. “It’s the time of our school vacations, and the weather is better,” said Mr. Trost of the Zurich team. “In late autumn we get snow, and the groundskeepers won’t let you on the fields.” So the teams play from March to mid-July, as is the practice in much of Europe.

Nobody gets rich playing football here. The players draw no salary, and in fact they must pay annual dues of almost $800 to play. They also pay for their own equipment, which can run to $1,700 if they want state-of-the-art gear. Coaches and officials may draw small stipends, and the clubs usually pay for the foreign players’ flights to Switzerland and find them lodging, a local job and sometimes a car.

“I’ll do it as long as I can,” Mr. Conti said, waiting on the sideline for the Broncos to regain possession so he could go back in as an offensive lineman. “It’s not for the money, but to see different places, the culture, the way of life.” As to the quality of Swiss football, “it’s a step down in competition,” he said. “They don’t have the same coaching and experience we have.”

Walter C. Tribolet perched on a folding chair on a mound under a maple tree at about the 40-yard line, sporting an orange Denver Broncos T-shirt and baseball cap. “People don’t get rich,” said Mr. Tribolet, 34, who brought back a passion for football from a five-year stay as a student in Florida. “It’s just the opposite of the N.F.L.”

The National Football League started an overseas farm system, eventually called N.F.L. Europe, in the 1990s, but it scrapped the project in 2007, never having turned a profit.