“I know I’m not a top player”

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Steffen has been married to Qendresa since 2019 and is the father of two children. The family let the former crook and hotspur mature and calm down on the field. Steffen gave the ball to his son Lian (4) on Saturday. He showed him a jubilant pose before the game. “And he is even more obsessed with football than my daughter.”

In his youth, it doesn’t look like Steffen would ever become a professional football player, let alone a national team star. In the U16s of FC Aarau he turned out not to be good enough, after which he returned to amateur football at SC Schöftland and trained as a painter. But Steffen still finds his way. At the age of 20 he moved from the first division in Solothurn to Thun, after which he moved to the Bundesliga via YB and Basel, where he played for Wolfsburg for four and a half years. “If you want to go from painter to professional, you don’t get stones but stones in the way,” he told Blick a few months after his national debut.

Steffen plays his 29th international match against Belarus, but his national career now only seems to gain momentum. He made his debut against San Marino in the fall of 2015, but he could not really assert himself. He will miss the 2016 and 2021 European Championships due to injuries and Vladimir Petkovic will not be at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. In Qatar the time has finally come: Steffen celebrates his debut in a final against Brazil. After his hat-trick on Saturday, he says: “I’m not one of the top people in the national team, but I’m reliable. You know what you’re getting from me.”

Steffen says what he thinks, which is not always well received everywhere. “I am an honest boy, I also demand that from my counterpart.” In Wolfsburg he fell out with trainer Florian Kohfeldt last season and there were also frictions in Lugano. His February interview in the “Corriere del Ticino” made headlines when he said that he would like to be a leader, but that some of his teammates didn’t really accept his style.

Steffen is the first Nati player since Seppe Hügi in 1960 to score a clear hat-trick in an international match, ie three goals in a row within one half. The last time Haris Seferovic scored three times in an international match was in 2018 in a 5-2 win over Belgium. Xherdan Shaqiri also scored a treble twice, against Bulgaria (2011) and Honduras (2014 World Cup). Blick columnist Kubilay Türkyilmaz did the same (against Azerbaijan and the Faroe Islands). Record scorer Alex Frei, on the other hand, only scored three goals in an international match (against Luxembourg) once.

Source : Blick