Kurt Stettler

Kurt Stettler (21 August 1932 – 8 December 2020) was a Swiss football goalkeeper who played for Switzerland in the 1962 FIFA World Cup.

But at the end of the 1953–54 Nationalliga A season the team suffered relegation and Stettler moved on to play for Luzern.

In their 1962–63 season, with trainer Jiří Sobotka, Stettler was part of the Swiss Cup winning team as Basel beat the favourites Grasshopper Club Zürich in the Final.

In the Wankdorf Stadium on 15 April 1963 Heinz Blumer and Otto Ludwig scored the goal as Basel won 2–0.

This saw them visit British Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, French Polynesia, Mexico and the United States.

First team manager Jiří Sobotka together with 16 players and 15 members of staff, supporters and journalists participated in this world tour from 10 January to 10 February 1964.

Club chairman, Lucien Schmidlin, led the group, but as they arrived in the hotel in Bangkok, he realised that 250,000 Swiss Francs were missing.

From March 1978 he acted as trainer ad-interim for the first team until the end of the season and during this period he stood on the field as an emergency goalkeeper once and that at the age of 45.

In fact, he made a career for himself in Basel alongside his football playing in the "Bläsi" shopping center, where he worked his way up from salesman to manager.