Preamble In Switzerland, after the end of the first world war, the 1920s saw a rapid rise in the popularity of top-level football and also a decade of rapid growth in grassroots football and many new football clubs were formed. By the mid-1920s, every larger Swiss town had a football pitch and its own football club. Top level organised football also experienced a boom and the larger already existing clubs were also expanding and growing. Between 1922 and 1930, twelve new football stadiums were built, each with a capacity of over 10,000 spectators. Furthermore, semi- and fully professional football players began to emerge and transfer fees started to become a reality. The structure of the Swiss championships provided a top-tier Serie A with 27 teams (3 regional groups of 9 clubs) and a second-tier Promotion Series with 54 teams divided into 6 groups. From the third-tier the football system was arranged in the regional leagues, named Serie B, C and D. However, the Swiss league system was suffering a crisis and the differences had expand during the previous few years. There were continuous disagreements between smaller and larger clubs, mainly concerning promotion/relegation procedures, which included play-offs between lower-tier group winners and upper-tier group losers. Things came to a peak at exactly this time, due to the fact that at the end of the previous season there were no promotion/relegation play-offs between the top two tiers. At last years'
AGM the
Swiss Football and Athletics Federation (SFAV), as the Swiss Football Association used to call itself, then decided to reorganise the structures of their championships and that the first, second and third tiers would be re-arranged. The new league would start explicitly in the following season and his season remained as transition season.
Format The Cup competition that had been introduced five years earlier, to relieve these rising differences, proved to be a success. This season 135 clubs applied to join the cup competition and, therefore, it began with two preliminary rounds, before the main competition began. The first qualifying round was played at the end of August and second qualifying at the beginning of September 1930. The first principal round was played at the beginning of October. The competition was to be completed on Sunday 10 May 1931, with the final, which this year was held at the Campo Marzio in
Lugano. The preliminary rounds were held for the lower league teams that were not qualified for the main rounds. Reserve teams were not admitted to the competition. The 27 clubs from this season's top-tier, in the
1930–31 Swiss Serie A, joined the competition in the first principal round, which was played on Saturday and Sunday, 4 and 5 October. The matches were played in a knockout format. In the event of a draw after 90 minutes, the match went into extra time. In the event of a draw at the end of extra time, if agreed between the clubs, a second extra time was played. If the score was still level at the final whistle, a replay was foreseen and this was played on the visiting team's pitch. If no replay was agreed or the replay ended in a draw after extra time, a
toss of a coin would establish the team that qualified for the next round. ==Preliminary rounds==