Celebrated in Frankfurt, sacked in Hamburg, now landed at GC: Sonny Kittel (31) has to liven up the attacking play at the record champions - a professional with class, experience and a thick medical record.
No time? blue News summarizes for you
- Sonny Kittel played for Eintracht Frankfurt in the Bundesliga as a 17-year-old and was hailed as a "decade talent".
- However, Kittel was repeatedly thwarted by injuries during his career and was never able to fully exploit his potential.
- Kittel, now 31 years old, will now try his luck at GC. With his class, he could be worth his weight in gold for the Zurich club. Let's just hope he stays healthy.
- Kittel once said of himself: "I'm not a guy who has to present himself in front of the cameras, I want to give answers on the pitch."
Where he was, he was at the top - at least at the beginning of the 10s. Sonny Kittel was fast, refined, clever and successful on the pitch. The kind of attacking player you would have loved to see. At 17, he was already playing for Eintracht Frankfurt in the Bundesliga under future GC coach Michael Skibbe. The local Frankfurt press were not stingy with their praise: they hailed him as a "talent of the decade", as a model player for Frankfurt's youth development program - and, not least, as a future star of the German national team. It seemed: "The sky's the limit."
That was a good decade ago. It feels almost longer. Last Saturday, Sonny Kittel sat in Zurich's Letzigrund, where the wind whistles through even at 33 degrees in the shade. The Letzigrund is Kittel's new footballing reality. Kittel signed a contract with the record champions until the end of the season with an option for a further year. He watched GC's 3:1 win over Sion in front of a good 4,500 fans calmly, almost motionless, often with his arms folded.
He will know that the Grasshoppers' performance this season depends largely on him. On his will to tickle everything out of himself in Switzerland as well; on the greed to give his last shirt for GC, as he did for Frankfurt, but also for Hamburger SV and the DFB youth team. This 2024/25 edition of GC can use technique, pace and goal threat more than ever. But it also depends on the one factor that Kittel has struggled with throughout his career: his body.
Injured for 1189 days!
Kittel is now 31 years old. And the fact that he has said goodbye to the big clubs and leagues of this world is also due to his medical record; it could hardly be thicker. Even in his heyday at Eintracht, Kittel was out of action for 1189 days between 2010 and 2016 - two cruciate ligament ruptures and cartilage damage caused the most damage. As a result, he had to leave Frankfurt in the summer of 2016 with a heavy heart. In the year that, to a certain extent, marked the start of Frankfurt's upswing with Cup and Europa League victories.
Kittel, on whom many hopes were always pinned due to his class as a player, was also unlucky in Hamburg. In his four years until 2023, he was practically always a regular, but the defunct Bundesliga dinosaur missed out on promotion every time - sometimes clearly, sometimes narrowly, sometimes by a wafer-thin margin, sometimes dramatically.
Dismissed as the culprit at HSV
His farewell from the Hanseatic city was not free of bad tones. He was hoping for a new contract in 2023 after a desired move to Saudi Arabia fell through. However, the HSV offer did not materialize - also because some in the club's environment castigated him as one of the main culprits for missing out on promotion.
At the time, Kittel told Bild: "Anyone who knows me knows how hard and hard I worked every day. When you're the only one to blame, of course it hurts, that's human. You have to be able to deal with that. I've taken a lot from this time."
After a year in Poland, Kittel, a father of two, is now wearing the kit of the Swiss record champions. Kittel once said about himself on Transfermarkt.ch: "I'm not a guy who has to present himself in front of the cameras, I want to give answers on the pitch." That can only be good for GC.
Kittel may make his first appearance for GC on Friday evening. In the cup, the Zurich team have to play away at FC Thun. Kick-off is at 20:00.
