JGregor Kobel is now experiencing his great moment on Swiss television, accompanied by almost the same words as his predecessor. “The dog is holding on! The male dog is holding on!” – famous SRF commentator Sascha Ruefer shouted into the microphone in Vancouver on Tuesday as Kobel parried Colombian Cucho Hernandez’s shot in the World Cup round of 16 penalty shootout. And again the famous words about the historical triumph were spoken by Rüfer. You have already made a career.
“Summer lasts! Summer lasts! Summer lasts! is still a legendary shout in Swiss football. He turned a very good goalkeeper, Jan Sommer, into a legendary goalkeeper, Jan Sommer, who saved the decisive penalty from Kylian Mbappe in a fantastic last 16 of the European Championship in the summer of 2021. “Nati”, as the Swiss selection is called, reached the quarter-finals of the European Championship for the first time, beat the great football nation of France and broke the sound barrier. And the goalkeeper was chosen as a hero.
Relatively short for a 1.83m goalkeeper who has been Switzerland’s starting goalkeeper since 2014, Sommer’s status has been so great since the penalty shootout that he has been cast in an imposing shadow. There have been other very good goalkeepers from the outstanding goalkeeping nation of Switzerland over the years, such as Marwin Hitz and Roman Bürki. However, they always remain number two, albeit with lamentation. Hitz, for example, once harshly criticized the national team’s goalkeeping coach Patrick Foletti, known as “Fox.” Newspaper “New Zurich”: Foletti, a very respected person in the industry, is “too closely” associated with Sommer, does not give others a chance and only promotes his favorite.
The male dog appeared in Cucho Hernandez’s Elfmeter of the Colombians. Lindsey Wasson/AP/dpa
Thus, it was a tense internal situation in which Gregor Kobel accepted the legacy of the legendary summer in the fall of 2024. Foletti and Kobel reportedly had a tense relationship, even though they had known each other for a long time. One looked after the other in his youth, at the Grasshoppers club in Zurich, where Kobel’s greatest potential was not recognized: “I Blik Foletti once told how he sent the young Kobel to Hoffenheim, from where he moved to Borussia Dortmund via Augsburg and Stuttgart. Yet Kobel always had a certain underdog image because he didn’t quite fit in with the so-called modern goalkeeping game.
This was especially noticeable in the national team. There, Kobel was compared with his predecessor, who came from this particular school: Sommer is physically less impressive than Kobel, who is twelve centimeters taller, but combines technically accomplished goalkeeping with remarkable football skills. Completely different from Kobel, who acts very instinctively, sometimes unconventionally and is not always confident in handling the ball at his feet. Combined with a weak phase for the entire Swiss team in the autumn of 2024, including elimination in the Nations League, this led directly to a crisis: Kobel conceded twelve goals in his first six matches as Switzerland’s first-choice goalkeeper, received a lot of criticism, and the Swiss media even reported distrust within his own team.
“It was a learning experience that I was able to have,” Kobel said, reflecting on his first year as number one. With some peace of mind, because after that it became better.
For Kobel and Switzerland, the current stage of success began with a trip to the USA last summer.
A visibly older figure stood in the press area of Vancouver Stadium on Tuesday. Kobel was named “Player of the Game” for his performance against Colombia, which was justified not only by his save in the penalty shootout, but also because he made two outstanding saves in extra time. He remains “bad at talking about emotions,” Kobel said. But: “From a sporting point of view, this is definitely the best day of my life. I guess I need a moment to take it all in.”
His coach Murat Yakin paid tribute to Kobel and recalled the trip to the USA that the Swiss made last summer. “It was the beginning of the World Cup year, also for him and his position,” said Yakin, who has since seen Kobel as a fan who refuses to take risks but “gets better and better at the technical elements.” In any case, the trip to the USA was a successful stage for Switzerland, which led to the quarter-finals of the World Cup for the first time, qualifying without defeat.
“Anything is possible, we can just play for a small country because we have nothing to lose – even if it’s crazy that we are where we are,” Kobel said after the game against Colombia. The 28-year-old now has the chance to continue building his monument: in the quarter-final against Argentina, Kobel is likely to be in the spotlight in the same way that Cape Verdean goalkeeper Vozinha and Egyptian Mostafa Shobeir have been in the past few weeks, both of whom brought the reigning world champion to at least the brink of defeat with their outstanding performances.
Kobel said he would not prepare much for Lionel Messi and Argentina’s offensive. Not only in football terms, he resembles a somewhat forgotten form of the classic goalkeeper. But sometimes he also sounds like an old-school goalie: “You can watch them shoot to the right a hundred times, but if he shoots to the left once, you’re left with a mess,” Kobel said. He prefers to rely on his instincts – after all, they have taken him further in his career than many thought.