What a Clear Game Model Does to a Season: Inside FC St. Gallen's 2025/26

One of the clubs we worked with this season was FC St. Gallen. They finished second in the Swiss Super League, qualified for Europe, and won the Swiss Cup for the first time in 26 years. A great season by any measure. Here is what the data said about how they got there.

Success does not come overnight. Last summer we ran a workshop with their coaching staff, where they walked us through their game model and their principles, at a team level and at an individual level.

They had a clear game model and clear individual development points. The problem is the one every club knows: measuring all of that, week after week, is time-consuming, and because there is always something more urgent in front of you, it gets pushed down the list and then overlooked. So we set up their game model and their individual player profiles inside MyGamePlan, with their own custom metrics. Then the season did the talking.

The table tells the headline

Eighth last season. Second this season. A jump of six places in the Swiss Super League in a single year, and on top of that a cup and a European place.

But the table is the outcome. The game model is the reason. Here is where FC St. Gallen led the league.

Best defending team in the league

Fewest lines broken through the centre by opponents. Nobody in the division made it harder to play through them.

Best offensive transition team in the league

Most shots and most metres carried after winning the ball. They hurt teams the moment possession turned.

Best defensive transition team in the league

Fewest shots and fewest final-third entries conceded after an opponent's transition. When they lost the ball, they rarely got punished for it.

One player, measurably better

Several players progressed immensely across the season, Christian Witzig above all. He produced the league's clearest upward progression curves on two specific things his coach asked for: defensive pressing runs and runs into the final third. Both trended up week by week, and both finished well above the league benchmark.

That is not a generic number off a dashboard. It is one player getting measurably better at two of the exact actions his game model is built on.

The coach's own words

We have been using MyGamePlan to feed in our principles, and after every game I can measure and watch how we have implemented our plan on the pitch.

Enrico Maaßen, Head Coach, FC St. Gallen, speaking in a pre-game press conference.

That is the whole point. None of the numbers above are statistics we handed the club off a shelf. They are this coach's own principles, made measurable and followed week by week. The game model the staff actually believed in, turned into something you can see on the pitch on every matchday.

It's football, not statistics

St. Gallen's season was not an end-of-season surprise. It was trackable from matchday one, in the principles their staff set out last summer. Same idea, more than 40 clubs over, across Europe, the Americas and the Middle East. That is the work we get to do.

If your club has a clear game model but no clean way to see whether it shows up on the pitch, that is exactly the gap we close. Book a demo with MyGamePlan and we will set up your model the way we set up theirs.