Zeki Amdouni #23

Profile

The son of a Turkish kiosk owner and a Tunisian mother is still regarded as one of the country’s greatest talents, but he has faced a race against time to recover from an ACL injury suffered in pre-season with Burnley. Bayern Munich’s Vincent Kompany is an admirer and it was the Belgian who took Amdouni to England in 2023. The Switzerland manager, Murat Yakin, also thinks highly of a player whose style is that of a street footballer from Geneva, not dissimilar to that of Xherdan Shaqiri. Yakin invited him to be part of the squad for the March friendlies despite not being match-fit yet. In an interview with Blick he explained why he now prefers Messi to Ronaldo. “When I was young I liked everything about Ronaldo; his hair, his boots, his whole style. When I turned 13, though, and really started to understand football there was only one player for me: Messi.” He also explained why he has adopted a bow and arrow goal celebration: “It was something between me and a friend,” he said. “It comes from a French rapper called Jul he sings about an arrow in one of his songs so I said to the friend that from then on I was going to do that as a celebration. I wanted to do something no one else does.”

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