Urs Fischer of Union Berlin wasn’t available. Lucien Favre, the former Borussia Dortmund coach who is now at Nice in France’s Ligue 1, said no. Arsene Wenger was prepared to work in Switzerland, but only to peddle hare-brained schemes from FIFA, not to coach the national team.
And so, the Swiss FA’s choice in August last year came down to three options pretty near the bottom rung of the ladder: Bernard Challandes, who had last coached Armenia and Kosovo; Rene Weiler, on the market after a stint at Al Ahly in Egypt; Murat Yakin, a former Switzerland international living life as “a football recluse”, according to Swiss-German newspaper Aargauer Zeitung, with Schaffhausen in the domestic second division.
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Yakin had been a young managerial star a decade earlier, twice a Swiss title winner with Basel and a home-and-away vanquisher of Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea in the Champions League. An Egyptian winger called Mohamed Salah scored a goal in each of those Basel wins.
But in the ensuing years, during spells at Spartak Moscow and high-profile engagements at Swiss sides Grasshoppers and Sion that ended in acrimony, Yakin’s coaching career ran out of steam. It was unlikely to gather much pace again at Schaffhausen’s 8,000-capacity Wefox Arena.
The 48-year-old admitted he was surprised by the call from the FA.
“When you’re working at Schaffhausen in the Challenge League, you ask yourself, ‘Can I really be a candidate?’. Talks (with the federation) were open, free, light-hearted. I realised that I actually fulfilled the criteria.”
So did Switzerland’s sporting director Pierluigi Tami. The 61-year-old wasn’t looking for someone to make wholesale changes after Vladimir Petkovic’s sudden departure to French club Bordeaux.
Switzerland had reached the quarter-finals of Euro 2020 weeks before after beating world champions France on penalties with the 59-year-old Petkovic in charge, and the core of that side would still be in their primes for this World Cup campaign.
Of all the realistic contenders, Yakin, a well-liked centre-back for the “Nati” in the 1990s, was the people’s choice and logical candidate to carry on Petkovic’s legacy.
Switzerland have had plenty of quietly successful World Cup coaches in recent years. Roy Hodgson took them to their first finals in 30 years in 1994. Jakob “Kobi” Kuhn made it to the round of 16 in 2006, Ottmar Hitzfeld got that far 12 years later, as did Petkovic in Russia.
They were mostly avuncular types — well-respected but rather reluctant leaders who played up to Switzerland’s humble self-image. Yakin is different.
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You could easily see him as a dashing police detective in a Swiss noir series or as a smooth-talking A&R man, unearthing the best new bands in Silverlake, Los Angeles.
Charming, cool and confident, he is the suave man of the world many in Switzerland aspire to be — but only in secret. To do so overtly would be too boastful for local tastes.
There is plenty of substance behind the style, however.
As a coach, he had no qualms about frequently substituting his brother Hakan when managing Swiss club Luzern and once reportedly told a player that he would break his leg if he pulled out of a tackle again. Former team-mates and players of his say Yakin is someone with an instinctive understanding of the way games unfold, that he can see twists and turns before they occur.
In the pre-game press conference for the last-16 tie today (Tuesday) against Portugal, Yakin said “we know them as a team” four times. They played each other in the Nations League (1-0 Switzerland at home, 4-0 Portugal away) this year, but he would have watched hours more of them before this meeting at the Lusail Stadium.
Yakin is a more reactive manager than his predecessor, who tends to set up his team in order to negate the opposition’s strengths and exploit their weaknesses.
Against a good attacking side — for example, Brazil in the group stage here (a 1-0 defeat) — that approach can come across as overly negative but Yakin showed in the 3-2 group-finale win over Serbia four days later that he is prepared to push more men forward if he believes the opposition back line is suspect.
While scuffles broke out all around him at that game on Friday, Yakin stood on the touchline with one hand in his pocket, a picture of serenity.
“He’s the flaneur (stroller) at the eye of the storm,” the Zurich-based Tages-Anzeiger newspaper wrote about his habit of walking the perimeter of the pitch before each game after qualification for the knockouts was secured.
Things did not come as easy to him in his childhood.
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He grew up in the Basel suburb of Muttenz, sharing a flat with his Turkish-immigrant parents — his father was a welder, his mother a nurse — with seven siblings. In the summer holidays, they could not afford the plane tickets and travelled to Turkey by train — a two-day trip. “We had 25 supermarket bags of stuff with us,” he recalled.
Football was the way up.
He started his professional career at 17, signing for Zurich side Grasshoppers. Two years later, Hodgson was so eager to call up the central defender for that 1994 World Cup in the United States that he and the Swiss FA wrote letters to the authorities, pleading with them to speed up his three-year naturalisation process.
Yakin ended up missing tha tournament, but not because of his passport arriving late: he was seen at the hotel bar 15 minutes after curfew at the first get-together and banished from the squad. “I wasn’t the only one, someone snitched on me,” Yakin told Swiss media outlet Blick. “Fifteen years later, Roy Hodgson apologised to me and said he’d do it differently.”
After forcing his way back into the national team, Yakin was held back by injuries and too much chocolate, but he still became one of the national team’s most popular “Secondos”, as they call second-generation immigrants in Switzerland.
Now he’s the first Secondo in charge of the national team.
Yakin does not like talking too much about his background and identity, but broadsheet Neue Zurcher Zeitung believes his appointment is politically significant. “He’s not just a coach but a reflection of the times,” they wrote. “By entrusting him with the most important team, (Switzerland) endows him with power and influence, and makes him visible, socially.”
Many reporters and supporters alike were bracing themselves for a clash of egos between the headstrong Yakin and captain Granit Xhaka but they have struck up a good working relationship.
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The Arsenal midfielder said he had become “older and calmer” before his calculated stoking of the flames in that win over Serbia, and he can rely on the understanding of a national manager in tune with the needs and feelings of his players.
“It helps a lot that he’s a former international himself — he knows what it’s like to play for this team,” Xherdan Shaqiri told journalists at the Swiss training base in Doha University on Monday.
A mini-wave of euphoria has gripped Switzerland ahead of this meeting with Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal — a chance to make the last eight of a World Cup for the first time since 1954.
“Statistics are not so important, but we want to continue this story and gift the nation one more game,” Yakin said with a relaxed smile. “A little over a year ago, I would have never imagined myself sitting in this room. But that’s football. I’m so proud and happy to be doing this job.”
One more win, and his name will be etched in Swiss football history.
- Follow the latest World Cup news, analysis, tables, fixtures and more here.
(Top photo: Michael Steele/Getty Images)
