Ciriaco Sforza

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Ciri Sforza
Ciriaco Sforza.jpg
Personnel
Surname Ciriaco Sforza
birthday March 2nd 1970
place of birth Wohlen (AG),  Switzerland
Size 180 cm
position Central midfield / Libero
Juniors
Years station
1976-1988 FC Villmergen
1978-1986 FC Wohlen
Men's
Years station Games (goals) 1
1986-1988 Grasshopper Club Zurich 66 0(5)
1988-1990 FC Aarau 22 0(3)
1990-1993 Grasshopper Club Zurich 75 0(7)
1993-1995 1. FC Kaiserslautern 61 (15)
1995-1996 FC Bayern Munich 30 0(2)
1996-1997 Inter Milan 26 0(1)
1997-2000 1. FC Kaiserslautern 91 0(4)
2000-2002 FC Bayern Munich 36 0(1)
2002-2006 1. FC Kaiserslautern 47 0(1)
National team
Years selection Games (goals)
1991-2001 Switzerland 79 0(7)
Stations as a trainer
Years station
2006-2008 FC Luzern
2009–2012 Grasshopper Club Zurich
2014-2015 FC Wohlen
2015-2015 FC Thun
2019-2020 FC Wil
2020– FC Basel
1 Only league games are given.

Ciriaco "Ciri" Sforza (born March 2, 1970 in Wohlen (AG)) is a former Swiss football player and current coach . As a player, Sforza was one of the most successful Swiss footballers of the 1990s. After completing his playing career, he embarked on a coaching career, supervising various Swiss clubs from 2006 to 2015. Sforza has been head coach of FC Basel since August 2020 .

Career as a player

societies

Sforza was born the son of Italian citizens in Wohlen in Aargau ; since 1990 he has been a Swiss citizen . In Switzerland he started out as a youth player at FC Villmergen and FC Wohlen before joining the youth team at Grasshopper Club Zurich in 1986 . He was used there early in the first team; He made his debut in a 2-2 draw against FC St. Gallen . In 1988 he won the Swiss Cup with the GCZ under Austrian coach Kurt Jara with a 2-0 final victory over FC Schaffhausen . After Ottmar Hitzfeld had become the new coach in Zurich for the 1988/89 season and Sforza wanted to retrain as a right defender, he moved to FC Aarau in the middle of the season , where he could continue to be active as a midfielder. With Aarau he was able to hold the class in the relegation round in 1988/89 and 1989/90.

After he was able to establish himself in the first division in Aarau, he switched back to the Grasshoppers at the age of 20, where he matured to become a regular player in midfield. Back in his first season, he won the Swiss championship in 1991 . Shortly afterwards he made his debut for the national team. In 1993 he was named Swiss Footballer of the Year for the first time .

For the 1993/94 season , Sforza took his next career step by moving to the Bundesliga for 1. FC Kaiserslautern . He quickly made a name for himself there. In the first season he was runner- up with the Palatine team under coach Friedel Rausch , just one point behind FC Bayern. In the following season it was only enough for fourth place, but Sforza was then signed for a remarkable seven million marks by the German record champions FC Bayern Munich .

As the preferred player of the new Munich trainer Otto Rehhagel , Sforza started the 1995/96 season with much praise and made 30 appearances, but fell short of the great expectations. After Rehhagel was released towards the end of the season, he won under the entrant as manager president Franz Beckenbauer the UEFA Cup in 1995/96 , where he appeared in two finals against Girondins de Bordeaux to Zinedine Zidane was used. In the Bundesliga it was only enough for a disappointing second place behind Borussia Dortmund for Bayern .

For the subsequent season he moved to from Roy Hodgson trained Inter Milan in the Italian Serie A . There he did well with his winning goal to make it 1-0 in the first game at Udinese Calcio , but did not impress in his other 25 league games in which he contributed to third place for the Milanese. It was also problematic that he and England international Paul Ince basically played in the same position and did not harmonize well when they played at the same time. He was still part of the team that lost 1-0 and 1-0 on penalties in the 1996/97 UEFA Cup finals against FC Schalke 04's "Eurofighters" . After the end of the season, Hodgson, Ince and Sforza left the club. Sforza was resumed at 1. FC Kaiserslautern, who had previously been promoted back to the Bundesliga under Rehhagel after a year of absence.

There Sforza achieved another great success with the German championship in 1998 , after the Palatinate surprisingly won the title in their first season after returning to the Bundesliga. As the leading figure in the team, Sforza played a key role in this. In addition to the 1990 world champion Andreas Brehme , the team also included the young Michael Ballack and the second-best goalscorer in the Bundesliga season, Olaf Marschall . In the following Champions League he was eliminated in the quarterfinals with 0: 2 and 0: 4 against Bayern. He remained active for Kaiserslautern in the following two seasons, when the Palatinate team finished fifth, before moving to Bayern again in 2000, now at the age of 30, this time for around four and a half million marks.

There he won his second German championship title in the 2001 season , to which he contributed in 20 missions. But more important was winning the Champions League of the same season, although it was not used in the final against Valencia , although it had previously been in nine games of the competition, and the World Cup , where he played CA Boca Juniors in Tokyo in November 2001 In the 75th minute coach Ottmar Hitzfeld came on for Owen Hargreaves . In the next season, FC Bayern failed to defend their title: in the Bundesliga, where Sforza was used 16 times, they came second and in the Champions League, where Sforza played in five games up to the second round, they were eliminated in the quarter-finals.

From August 2002 he was active again for Kaiserslautern in the Bundesliga, but only made a few games due to an injury. A highlight was reaching the final in the DFB-Pokal 2002/03 , where Sforza was in all games from the 2nd round to the semifinals, but not in the 1: 3 final against Bayern. Sforza played his last game as a professional in October 2005, when 1. FC Kaiserslautern and Borussia Dortmund were separated by 3: 3. Sforza, who had just served the only red suspension of his Bundesliga career, was substituted at half time and suspended after the game by coach Michael Henke . Although Sforza offered himself again as a player after Henke's expulsion in November 2005, he was not considered by his successor Wolfgang Wolf either. At the end of the season, 1. FC Kaiserslautern was relegated from the Bundesliga as third from bottom.

National team

Sforza made his debut for the " Nati " on August 21, 1991 in Prague in a 1-1 draw against Czechoslovakia . By 2001 he had made 79 international matches for the Swiss and scored seven goals. His career highlights include taking part in the 1994 World Cup in the USA , in which Switzerland made it to the round of 16 and Spain lost 3-0, and taking part in the 1996 European Championships in England , where they were eliminated in the preliminary round. In 1999 he was voted the best Swiss national player of the year .

Career as a coach

At the same time as his last season in the Bundesliga, Sforza acquired the A license as a coach. From the beginning of the 2006/07 season until August 2008 he was a coach at the Swiss Super League club FC Luzern . Most recently, in spring 2007, while working in Lucerne, he completed the German Football Association's football teacher training course at the Hennes-Weisweiler Academy of the German Sport University in Cologne and therefore has a UEFA Pro license.

In June 2009 Sforza was introduced as the new coach of Grasshoppers Zurich . After finishing third in his first year and seventh in 2011, his contract with the Grasshoppers was extended by two years. At the end of the 2011/12 season , the club separated from Sforza. Sforza took second division club FC Wohlen to third place in the 2014/15 season and thus to the best result in the club's history. On July 26, 2015, FC Thun announced on its homepage that Sforza had been appointed coach for two seasons, but the engagement was terminated on September 30, 2015 by mutual agreement. From April 2019 he was coach of FC Wil in the Challenge League and received a three-year contract.

At the end of August 2020, Sforza withdrew his release clause from FC Wil and moved to FC Basel , where he succeeded Marcel Koller and signed a two-year contract.

successes

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Message ( memento of the original from July 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the homepage of FC Thun @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fcthun.ch
  2. ↑ Andreas Babst: Ciriaco Sforza can be a trainer again. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from April 1, 2019.
  3. ↑ Felix Bingesser and Andreas Böni: Koller's successor: Ciriaco Sforza becomes a trainer in Basel. August 25, 2020, accessed August 25, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Top scorer of the month October 1997
personal data
SURNAME Sforza, Ciriaco
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sforza, Ciri
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss football player and coach
DATE OF BIRTH March 2nd 1970
PLACE OF BIRTH Well