Switzerland

Switzerland enter Group B as comfortable favourites but face two genuinely awkward matchups. The opener against Qatar on June 13 in the Bay Area should be a comfortable win — Yakin will rotate cautiously, keep Akanji and Xhaka, and look for an early Ndoye or Embolo goal that lets him manage the second half. Qatar’s defensive shape will make breaking through harder than the FIFA ranking gap suggests; a 2-0 or 2-1 result is the median expectation.

The middle game in Los Angeles against Bosnia is the difficult one. Bosnia have the set-piece weaponry to score against the Swiss back three, and their two-striker shape (Džeko and Demirović) is uncomfortable for a 3-4-2-1 with Akanji and Elvedi covering acres. Yakin may pivot to a back four for this game. A draw is plausible; a 2-1 Swiss win is the median expectation. The closing fixture against Canada in Vancouver six days later will have major group-positioning stakes — Switzerland could already have clinched, in which case Yakin will rotate Granit Xhaka and several starters and lean on the Manzambi-Jashari-Sow midfield rotation.

The realistic ceiling is the quarter-finals. Switzerland have not been there since Euro 2024 and at a World Cup not since the 1950s. The experienced spine, the unbeaten qualifying campaign, and the relatively manageable knockout draw (the Group B winner avoids most of the elite UEFA seeds in the round of 16) makes the quarter-final a genuine target rather than wishful thinking. The floor is a sixth straight round-of-16 exit. The most-likely outcome is winning Group B on seven or nine points, a round-of-32 game against a CONCACAF or African third-place finisher, and a competitive round-of-16 match against a Group A or C runner-up that goes either way.

Switzerland are Group B’s favourites by every standard measurement — FIFA ranking (20, comfortably ahead of Canada’s 31, Qatar’s 53 and Bosnia’s 75), recent results, squad depth, manager continuity and tournament experience. They qualified directly out of UEFA Group B with 16 points from six games, an undefeated five-win-one-draw record, +12 goal difference, only two goals conceded in qualifying, including a 4-1 demolition of Sweden in Solna and a 4-0 dismantling of Kosovo at home. Murat Yakin announced his 26-man squad on May 20, 2026 — the same day his federation rolled out a coordinated social-media reveal of all 26 players over two days.

Recent form sits at the absolute top of European mid-tier performance. The qualifying campaign was the cleanest in UEFA Group B by a wide margin, with goals spread across nine different scorers. The squad reads as a continuity machine: 17 of the 26 played in Qatar in 2022, three more were at the Euro 2024 quarter-final exit to England (on penalties, after a 1-1 draw), and the new faces — 20-year-old Freiburg midfielder Johan Manzambi, AC Milan’s Ardon Jashari, Eintracht Frankfurt’s Aurèle Amenda — were already part of the qualifying group. The final pre-tournament tune-up is a friendly against Jordan at kybunpark in St. Gallen on May 31.

Yakin, born and trained in Basel and a former Swiss international centre-back himself (2002 World Cup squad), took the national-team job in 2021 from Vladimir Petković. His tactical hallmark is a flexible back three that shifts to a back four against teams that don’t commit numbers forward, and a double pivot of Xhaka and Remo Freuler that has been a fixture for five years. Against possession-based opponents he sits deeper and counter-presses; against lower blocks (which is what he will see from Qatar) he flips to a 4-2-3-1 and uses Dan Ndoye and Rubén Vargas as inverted wingers to overload the half-spaces.

The personnel question is in attack. Breel Embolo remains the lone centre-forward of pedigree but is coming off a quiet season at Rennes; Noah Okafor at relegated Leeds and Zeki Amdouni at relegated Burnley both lost top-flight status in 2025-26; Dan Ndoye at Nottingham Forest is the in-form Premier League pick. Group B’s draw — Qatar first, Bosnia second, Canada last — favours a strikerless 4-2-3-1 in two of three games and gives Yakin the luxury of holding back. Behind, Akanji and Nico Elvedi are a top-15-in-the-world centre-back pairing, and Ricardo Rodríguez plays his fourth straight World Cup at 33, with 136 caps already in the bag.

WC history runs deeper than any Group B rival. Switzerland have appeared at twelve World Cups, reached the quarter-finals three times (1934, 1938, 1954), and in the current era have made the round of 16 in 1994, 2006, 2014, 2018 and 2022 — five of the last six. The ceiling for this tournament is the quarter-finals: realistic, the team has the experience and the structural floor to do it, but they have lost five consecutive round-of-16 games stretching back to 2006 (1990 USA, 1994 Spain, 2006 Ukraine, 2014 Argentina, 2018 Sweden, 2022 Portugal — that streak ended only when 2024 Euro QF reset the pattern). The floor is a fourth straight last-16 exit. The most-likely outcome is Group B winners on 7-9 points, a round-of-32 game against a CONMEBOL or African third-place finisher, and a serious round-of-16 test against a Group A or C runner-up.

Murat Yakin was born September 15, 1974 in Basel, the son of Turkish-immigrant parents and the older brother of former Swiss international Hakan Yakin. He was a Switzerland international defender, playing 49 times for the national team between 1994 and 2004, including the 2004 European Championship and the 2002 World Cup squad (though without significant minutes). His club career was almost entirely Swiss — Grasshopper, then FC Basel, where he won three league titles as a player and a fourth in his coaching tenure — with a Bundesliga spell at Kaiserslautern from 1999 to 2003 in the middle. The link to Basel is fundamental: he became Basel’s head coach in 2012, won the 2012-13 and 2013-14 Swiss Super League titles, the 2012 Swiss Cup, and reached the 2012-13 Europa League semi-final.

His post-Basel coaching journey was meandering before the national-team appointment. There were one-season spells at FC Thun before Basel and then jobs at Spartak Moscow (2015, sacked within the season), Grasshopper Zürich (briefly, 2016), Schaffhausen in the Swiss second tier (twice — 2017-18 and again 2019-21), and Sparta Prague (2018, also brief). The Swiss FA hired him on August 9, 2021 to replace Vladimir Petković after the latter departed for Bordeaux. Yakin took over a squad fresh off a Euro 2020 quarter-final and a famous penalty-shootout win over France in the round of 16.

The tactical signature is flexibility from a defensive base. Yakin defaults to a 3-4-2-1 with wing-backs (Widmer/Muheim) pushing high and Akanji as the line-breaker from the back three, but he will switch to a 4-2-3-1 within a single match if the matchup demands it. Granit Xhaka and Remo Freuler form a fixed double pivot that has been in place for the entire Yakin tenure. Against possession-heavy opponents (Spain at Euro 2024, France at Euro 2020) he sits mid-block, baits the press into the wide channels, and counters through Embolo and the wingers; against lower blocks (which is what Qatar will offer) he flips to a back four and uses Ndoye and Vargas as inverted wingers. The team’s pressing triggers are tightly defined and well-rehearsed, which is the chief Yakin imprint.

What is at stake at this World Cup is the same thing that has been at stake for Switzerland for two decades: cracking the round of 16. Switzerland have made the round of 16 at five of the last six major tournaments (the only exception being Euro 2020, when they reached the quarter-finals); they have lost five round-of-16 games in a row before that streak ended at Euro 2024. Yakin has been openly criticised in the Swiss press for not adapting his game model to the tournament moment — particularly the 6-1 humbling by Portugal in the 2022 last-16 game — and a sixth straight last-16 exit could end his tenure. A quarter-final or better would secure his job through to Euro 2028. He has also clearly retained the dressing room: Xhaka publicly defends him, Akanji and Rodríguez have committed to a fourth straight World Cup under him, and the squad continuity speaks for itself.