Murat Yakin did look slightly surprised to be asked about his status as a sex symbol.
It was shortly after his Switzerland side had drawn with Scotland in their second group game at Euro 2024. In among all the questions about his team changes, tactical thinking and approach for the next game against tournament hosts Germany, it was slightly unusual.
But he’s a big hit on TikTok, apparently.
At a tournament where there have been some maverick touchline fashion choices, Yakin’s style is unfussy smart-casual: the sorts of clothes that aren’t immediately eye-catching but you can tell actually cost more than your car. He often wears a pair of large spectacles that, along with the streaks of grey in his swept-back hair, make him look a bit like Adam Driver playing Maurizio Gucci in the 2021 movie about the Italian clothing brand.
And for the thirstier corners of the internet, it clearly works.
When the question was asked, Yakin’s eyebrows rose towards the top of his forehead. Defender Manuel Akanji, sitting next to him, burst out laughing.
“I hope my wife isn’t listening to this,” said Yakin.
(Teresa Kroger – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
But it was probably a relief for Yakin to be fielding that sort of question, given what he had to deal with before the tournament.
Sure, Switzerland had qualified for Euro 2024 but by this point, there was a sense of ‘What else is new?’ about their national team. They have been at the past five World Cups and six of the eight most recent European Championships. Near-perennial presences. A comfort in a complicated world. No matter how uncertain everything else is, you can be confident that, every couple of years, you’ll see Ricardo Rodriguez playing for Switzerland at a major tournament.
But this particular qualifying campaign was deeply underwhelming, with Yakin’s team drawing five of their 10 group games and finishing a fairly distant second to Romania. Many people expected him to be replaced before these Euros even began.
The style of play was uninspiring. Yakin, previously a staunch four-at-the-back man, switched to a back three that felt like it was a bit of a Hail Mary, a return to the reliable approach of his long-term predecessor Vladimir Petkovic. A survey conducted by the Swiss newspaper Luzerner Zeitung suggested that 63 per cent of the country wanted someone else in charge.
As it has turned out, they have been one of the tournament’s most impressive teams.
They beat Hungary 3-1 in their opener, drew 1-1 with Scotland, but were much the better side in their second game, then came within minutes of defeating Germany 1-0 in their group finale.
More than the results though, what has been striking about Switzerland is how well they have been set up for each game.
The Swiss have an established, experienced core of players in midfield and defence. Goalkeeper Yann Sommer has Akanji, Fabian Schar and the ubiquitous Rodriguez ahead of him, and they have Granit Xhaka and Remo Freuler forming a rock-solid central midfield pairing ahead of them.
Beyond that, things get a little more uncertain.
Switzerland don’t have attackers of the same standing or ability as that core six but what they do have is a clutch of young players who, when deployed properly, can be extremely effective. So what Yakin has done, extremely smartly, is use those six bankers as the solid foundation of his team then, in attack, adopt a more ‘horses for courses’ approach.
Against Hungary, he felt he needed pace to get behind the defence, so selected Kwadwo Duah, who has been playing in Bulgaria and had just a half of international football to his name before this tournament. Duah scored after 12 minutes, having made a run in behind the Hungarian back line.
For Scotland, he felt a little more guile was required, so surprised everyone by picking Xherdan Shaqiri as sort of a false nine, allowing him to drop deep and roam. Shaqiri responded with a brilliant goal that, despite his diminished status at club level, only he could have scored.
And finally, he knew that in such a big game against the hosts, his team wouldn’t see much of the ball and would largely play on the counter-attack, so a little more experience and pace would be required. Thus, Breel Embolo started and kept the German defence occupied all night in a game where the Swiss had only 35 per cent possession.
On the flanks, things are fairly fluid. Ruben Vargas, Fabian Rieder and the impressive Dan Ndoye have shared duties as the wingers on either side of whoever plays up front. Wing-backs Silvan Widmer and Michel Aebischer are encouraged to move inside and bulk up the midfield and attacking options.
And it has, give or take, all worked.
Yakin hasn’t made a bad move, but it isn’t all down to him: around the start of the calendar year, with that poor qualifying campaign in mind, his position was uncertain. After much discussion, it was decided that he would take Switzerland to the tournament but would recruit a new assistant: a move like that is often a sign that your bosses don’t think you’re up to much, but in this case, Yakin welcomed in an old friend.
Giorgio Contini had been Yakin’s No 2 for the 2011-12 season with Swiss club Lucerne. Contini was most recently manager of Zurich side Grasshoppers and is known for his keen and flexible tactical brain.
Yakin’s decisions have all been made after lengthy discussions with Contini, who also serves as the conduit between the manager and his squad. Swiss newspaper SRF recently described Contini as a “player whisperer”. Contini has described his role, in part, as “putting the puzzle together”.
“These days, you know all your opponents in detail, thanks to analysis tools,” Contini said after the Hungary game, after which their head coach Marco Rossi admitted he had been caught off-guard by Switzerland’s approach. “If you can still say that you surprised your opponent, that means you had the right ideas.”
Contini, left, was appointed as Yakin’s assistant in February (Bernd Weissbrod/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As a player, Yakin was regarded as one of Switzerland’s greats, an elegant central defender who won the Swiss league five times and played for the national team for over a decade, many times alongside his brother, Hakan.
GO DEEPER
Ranking all the managers at Euro 2024: which of them was the best player?
“On the field, he was one of the cleverest players I ever saw,” says Pascal Zuberbuhler, who played with him at club and international level and now works for FIFA as its senior goalkeeping expert. “He could read the game massively. He could smell and feel the game; very cool, very calm, like you see him now on the sidelines. You never see him hectic. He’s always very calm.”
Zuberbuhler and Yakin were given their international debuts in the same game, just after the 1994 World Cup in a friendly against the United Arab Emirates, by Roy Hodgson. It went OK for the goalkeeper, who played a relatively uneventful 20 minutes as a substitute, but not quite so much for Yakin: he was sent off for two bookable offences.
Yakin went on to have a fine playing career, but Zuberbuhler thinks it could have been much bigger.
“He’s so relaxed, so easy,” says Yakin’s former team-mate. “I would sometimes think, ‘For f**k’s sake, Muri. Wake up! You could do much more. You could play for Barcelona, for Real Madrid‘.
“He was like Ronald Koeman as a player, but did not do the extra work, put in the extra hours: he was already on a high level, but he could have had a much better career.”
Even then, Yakin was thinking like a coach.
“He was someone who, after a game, if we were having a drink, he’d be asking why the coach didn’t move us like this or that,” says Zuberbuhler. “During games, he was already a second coach. He was already thinking strategically. He observes, he thinks, and he’s showing that now at this Euros.”
Yakin often talks about his love of chess, which he mentioned after the Hungary game.
“I don’t like to play poker; I like to play chess,” he said. “In poker, you never know what your opponent has.”
Yakin has guided Switzerland to the knockout stages for a second successive major tournament (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)
Chess is a game that is often given great importance when a football manager references it because of its strategic nature but it’s never clear if there really is some great connection between the two. Yakin, however, does seem to think it helps.
“A chess piece has no emotions, so you can’t compare players and pieces,” he said in an interview with Swiss magazine Schweizer Illustrierte this year. “But there are certainly parallels when it comes to tactics: I explain simple (chess) moves to my daughters: which steps they can make with which piece, how they have to think ahead and how to safeguard their tactics. If I set a strategy for the team, I have to be able to explain easily what I mean exactly.”
Yakin moved into coaching soon after retiring as a player but his previous record on the sidelines is a bit of a mixed bag. He started as an assistant at a few clubs before moving up to be a No 1 and was eventually appointed manager of Basel in his homeland in 2012. There, he won the league twice with a team that featured Sommer, Schar and a young Mohamed Salah.
But since then, things have been uneven. There was an ill-advised stint at Spartak Moscow and a couple of brief spells at Grasshoppers and Sion before he dropped into the Swiss second tier with Schaffhausen.
His record there was nothing to get too excited about, but when Petkovic stepped down in the summer of 2021, Yakin got the national-team job, a choice greeted with some surprise in Switzerland. Even with his status as a player in mind, elevating someone from the second division to manage the country is unusual.
Things started pretty well: Switzerland qualified for the 2022 World Cup by winning their group above European champions Italy but the actual tournament was a disappointment. They had a strong group stage in Qatar but were obliterated by Portugal in the round of 16, beaten 6-1 as Goncalo Ramos scored a hat-trick.
Then came that uninspiring Euros qualification campaign.
While dismissing a manager after successfully progressing to a major tournament would have been unorthodox, it wasn’t out of the question that this would happen to Yakin. The Swiss FA only confirmed he would take the team to Germany four days before the group-stage draw in December.
At the time, Yakin spoke as if the decision not to sign a longer-term contract was his, saying that he “wanted to prove himself”. That might have been a slightly optimistic version of events but he has proven himself over the past couple of weeks, and his confidence before their last-16 game against Italy today (Saturday) is well-founded.
“We don’t want to worry too much about Italy,” he said. “Italy needs to worry about us.”
GO DEEPER
What we learned from the Euro 2024 group stage – Ronaldo, Hala Madrid and big-man denial
(Top photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)