Remo Freuler is the Duracell bunny who never runs out

If you were born in Ennenda, a handful of houses thrown high above Switzerland's Glarus plateau, you can rest assured that a reasonable expectation for your future is to produce top-grade chocolate at the local Läderach company. Proximity ski slopes, just a few stables for cheese: for the rest, only delicious chocolate, made by master craftsmen who have homes throughout the valley. It is not a cliché, even if the three thousand scarce souls of the town feed on the concept: in fact, in Ennenda every historical family - more or less like in the Ampezzo -, as part of the patrician municipality, is responsible for the maintenance of every common good . A rule that is swallowed with milk, as a child, and conforms the personality for the rest of life. Thus, if you were born in Ennenda but you find yourself with the two feet of a more than decent footballer and an indestructible physique, you also bring the sense for managing what is collective to the pitch. And there you become a safe, a precision clock.

Remus Freulerserious and measured, has escaped the fate of sweet manufacturing to represent Switzerland like no other: native for generations, not far from the geographical orthocenter or from that of the field, the interior formerly of Atalanta and now under Nottingham Forest (where you can admire two Champions Cups every day in the company museum) he's used to taking care of the ball, shortening the distances between departments, doubling up on his closest teammate. Skills that are rarely learned, typical characteristics of those athletes that everyone would like to train: motionless engines, perfect organizers also for knowing how to stay in the shadows, behind the scenes. But on the pitch Freuler can be heard, oh if he can be heard: “He goes where the ball is”, they said years ago for Sami Khedira. Before realizing that it was the ball that went where the German first and Freuler later expected it to go: a 6.5 (at least) guaranteed in the Monday report cards, not infrequently seasoned with precious assists, decisive goals. Very few matches of him completely screwed up are remembered: if anything, slashing from outside, cunning insertions, capable of coming out at the last minute with perfect timing, escaping the radar of the defenses. This too is character: his apprenticeship in the Swiss Super League (Winterthur, Grasshopper, Lucerne) has shaped him, upon his arrival in Bergamo in winter 2016 he briefly meets Edy Reja, who begins to trust him and is repaid by a goal in six games played.

It could have been yet another meteor, of many sunk by a bulimic championship that can't wait, if Gasperini hadn't seen in him the man he was looking for to complete Marten de Roon. In six full seasons, Remo becomes irreplaceable to the point of squeezing: he skips matches only due to disqualification, goes through the first module changes unscathed up to the standard consolidated set-up, runs as much as a middle-distance runner and always, regularly, goes unnoticed. In a context dedicated to the enhancement of youth, seniority makes grades and Remo Freuler from Ennenda finds himself, in spite of himself, becoming a silent leader: he does it in his own way, with the project in hand as a trusted provincial surveyor, unscathed of the seasons like a Duracell bunny. The richest football in the world, the English one, realizes this and in Nottingham they decide that that prospectus is ideal for exalting themselves in box-to-box: Koopmeiners explodes in Bergamo, but occasionally Percassi and sporting director Tony d'Amico in their hearts must be regretting having given it lightly and not having resisted any longer, better a sick person at the door.

But it's also the year of the World Cup, after a leading European Championship in Switzerland, the surprise inside the chocolate egg. In the national team he represents the element of cohesion, the basic architrave of a multi-ethnic selection like never before: now the less obvious round of 16, against Cristiano Ronaldo's Portugal which is about to become Arabia. Freuler on the other hand, if he could, would probably stay on the same team for life, with the same people next to him, the reassuring certainties of mountain silence. And if the Red Cross don't start beaten, it's also because they know they can count on a fine brain that never betrays.