Twelve years after his departure, the 32-year-old footballer is playing for FC Basel again. An entire city can hardly believe its luck – and is dreaming big again.
He is received like a messiah in Basel: Xherdan Shaqiri at his first appearance at St. Jakob-Park.
Anyone who traveled to Basel almost a year ago, in the autumn of 2023, encountered a football city that was damaged, or at least, or rather: wounded.
Their pride and joy, FC Basel, was in last place in the Super League at the time. The club had not scored a single goal in the entire month of October. The fans even looked forward to a cup match against the lower-class SC Kriens with trepidation. Nothing seemed unthinkable in the city on the Rhine in those days.
At least that is still true in Basel now, ten months later. But thoughts there are now flying in completely different directions, and one footballer has made that happen: Xherdan Shaqiri, who once left Basel as a young man, went to Munich, to Milan, to Liverpool. To the big world of football.
Thousands come to greet him
Last Friday it was announced that Shaqiri is returning home from Chicago, where he last played. It is one of the most spectacular return moves in the history of the Swiss Super League and therefore excellent news for them.
And in Basel, they can hardly contain their joy. On Monday evening, thousands of people gathered in front of St. Jakob Park. They talked to each other, sipped a beer, licked an ice cream. But their gaze kept wandering upwards, to the balcony where Xherdan Shaqiri was soon to appear to say a few words, the first as a new, old FC Basel player.
Then, finally: Shaqiri.
At first he just stands there and says nothing. It wouldn’t do any good because no one would hear him anyway. When he finally speaks, Shaqiri inflates FC Basel back to its former greatness with a few sentences. As if the past few years had never happened.
He quickly speaks of the «Barfi»
Shaqiri soon ends up at the “Barfi”, the Barfüsserplatz, where FC Basel celebrates its championship title. He says the word “Chübel”, once, a second time, again and again, “Chübel”, which stands for the cup, for the title. And at some point: “Dr FCB isch zum Gwünne do.”
Cheers, of course, after every sentence from Shaqiri. Smoke bombs lit in red and blue. Chants. Raised fists. A club that is back to itself. Thanks to a returnee who, as a journalist would put it the next day, was greeted “like a messiah.”
Sought-after object: FC Basel has already sold several thousand Shaqiri jerseys with the number 10.
When Shaqiri is finished, people line up. “Meet Dr. Shaq,” it says on a sign. Shaqiri sits at a small table, gives autographs to awestruck children and fathers who are sweating with excitement. The line just doesn’t seem to end, and downstairs, in the fan shop, people proudly carry their new jersey home, Shaqiri, with the number 10 on the back. Several thousand have already been sold.
Something like this, they say in Basel, has never happened even here.
Shaqiri, the star you can touch, and people reach out to him, they are happy that they can do that: touch Shaqiri, and also touch FC Basel. Because that hasn’t been so easy in recent years.
The club was generally very cool in the transfer market, buying footballers to help them progress and then selling them on. It often managed to do this quite well, Zeki Amdouni is an example of this, Andy Diouf, Dan Ndoye, Riccardo Calafiori, Renato Veiga.
They all came and went quickly; FC Basel made nice transfer profits with all of them, but the touching was a different matter. And whoever was there to touch always had a harder time, a Taulant Xhaka, a Fabian Frei, a Michael Lang.
Xherdan Shaqiri gives the fans a hands-on experience during his presentation.
On Monday, Shaqiri spoke to the fans. On Tuesday, he sat down in front of the media in St. Jakob Park. And suddenly, small relativizations began to creep into his sentences.
The sports director does not want to adjust the goals
You have to stay grounded, says Shaqiri. He notes that FC Basel only came eighth last year and hasn’t won a major title for a long time. He says that he signed for three years and not one. It takes time. But at some point FC Basel will have to compete for titles again.
At some point, when is that? You don’t have to be a prophet to guess: This question will still be a topic of discussion in Basel, now that Shaqiri is back. A tram in the club’s colors still rolls through the city, with the words “Maischter Express” written on it. As a reminder: FC Basel last won the championship in 2017.
Sitting next to Shaqiri is Daniel Stucki, the club’s sporting director. He is delighted with the transfer coup that FCB has pulled off. He says that it is “an extremely great success” for FC Basel that Shaqiri is back. But Stucki does not want to publicly change the season’s goals because of this. He says the final round is the first goal. He speaks of the ambition to play internationally.
When he left, Frei, Streller and Abraham were sitting in the cabin
Shaqiri himself emphasises what he had already told the fans the day before: that for him there was only FC Basel, even if he would have “definitely earned a lot more” elsewhere. In Basel he wants to be a leader and bring his winning mentality. He is now temporarily living back at home in Kaiseraugst, in his parents’ apartment, where an old championship jersey of his still hangs.
In the afternoon there will be a public training session with Shaqiri, his first as a player for FC Basel since 2012. When he left the club for Munich, the squad included players like Alex Frei and Marco Streller, Gilles Yapi and David Abraham, Granit Xhaka and Yann Sommer.
FC Basel lacks this kind of charisma this season, and Shaqiri’s arrival won’t change that. The team recently won twice in the championship, 6-0 away against Servette – an upward trend. But now Shaqiri is here and Thierno Barry, the top scorer, will probably soon be gone. Despite all the euphoria, to a certain extent everything is just starting again from the beginning, as so often recently.
The next game for Basel is on Sunday, against Yverdon-Sport. For Shaqiri, it could be the first after his return. He hasn’t played since the European Championships and says he’s not yet at 100 percent. But of course he wants to help the team as quickly as possible.
Shaqiri says that this is the first time he’s training with the team and of course he wants to recommend himself for a place. Then he laughs like someone who is pretty sure of himself. Just like Shaqiri.