Two elements that had to be included, they looked like this:

Doodling

In a first round the doodle team just wanted to see 3-4 different ideas. So i set out to analyze my country and its relationship to football. What's so special about Swiss football? Here's my first shot at a couple of different approaches.

1. Switzerland has four different spoken languages

French in the west, Swiss German in the north, Italian in the south part of the alps and Rumantsch in the mountain valleys of the east. Like nothing else the World Cup unifies the people across geographical and lingual barriers and gives us all a common cause  we can agree to cheer for.

2. Silhouette Paper cut art

A (very) traditional and folkloristic Swiss artform, used mainly to depict rural and alpine scenes, for example cows being guided to their stables etc. All in black and white. Instead of this I wanted to draw a typical pre-match scene in Switzerland: Everyone heading to their viewing spot of choice, on foot, by bike, by rubber boat, carrying supplies, sausages, drinks, camping chairs.

3. Mountainous playing field

Switzerland isn‘t exactly a football giant, the mere fact that we‘re playing at the world cup always feels like a lot of hard work and is never taken for granted. Also, the team can be quite a tough opponent on a good day :-) I tried to depict this with a hilly playing field which also echoes the Swiss landscape. 

After that all it took was some more polishing, and Bob was my uncle. If you can't see the difference between the version on top and below you're not alone. I mainly sharpened the edges of the vegetation to make it appear more papercut-like and changed the ball in the middle.
Well, that was fun! Thanks a bunch to Erich Nagler, Vrinda Zaveri, Colin Duffy and the whole Doodle team! 

Make sure to check out all the fantastic doodles by the artists from the other participating countries.