The Roger Feutz “Gardien Acrobate” Reverso

A blue-dialled Reverso Standard, one of a set given in 1932 to the players of Lausanne-Sports after the club won the 1931–32 Swiss championship — each case engraved with the club’s initials and the individual player’s name, distributed through Spécialités Horlogères S.A. This particular watch belonged to Roger Feutz, the team’s goalkeeper, known to Swiss football fans as “le gardien acrobate” (the acrobat goalkeeper); he died in 2003 at 94. The Reverso itself was barely a year old at the time — among the earliest recorded examples of what would now be called a sports sponsorship in watchmaking. The piece surfaced publicly only in 2025, rediscovered and exhibited by Maison Riondet at FAB Paris, and appears in neither the standard reference works nor Manfred Fritz’s otherwise exhaustive Reverso — La légende vivante.