I’m playing in the Champions League again, Gabriel praises how football has helped him in business

That is why he now advises his two sons to follow him. To follow the same path as him. Twins Adam and Šimon, the first of whom wears the jersey of Danish Midtjylland and has already made his debut in the Czech national team, as well as Šimon, who signed for Slovakian Ružomberok after leaving Pilsen.

“Getting into the base, getting results, playing good football. This is the path that I have taken and at the end of which was a nomination to the national team, a start at the European Championship in 2000 in Belgium and the Netherlands, but also four championship titles with Sparta, matches in the Champions League and then eight years in German football , which gave me an awful lot,” 50-year-old Petr Gabriel summed up his career, which his two boys know perfectly, in a few sentences at the Sport.cz microphone.

“They both say they can do more in football than I do, so we’ll let it go and see each other in twelve years or so. So far I’m very happy with them, but I still talk to them about my philosophy of gradual steps. Rushing some things is useless. There were a lot of quick leavens that got into the toolbox once or twice. And mostly it was a shot that turned against the player,” the former defender of Sparta Prague and the Czech national team believes that Adam and Šimon will follow in his footsteps and their time will come.

And it is about the football and life journey of Petr Gabriel that the next part of the podcast Kopačka na hříbík is about. About military service in Cheb and engagement in Viktoria Žižkov, in whose jersey he played for the first time on the European cup stage. And right away against London’s Chelsea.

About the return to Sparta, which noticed its pupil years later and brought him back to the team that collected one championship title after another and played in the European cup year after year.

“The competition in Sparta was great, so I more or less alternated in the lineup for the first two seasons. And mostly in positions I wasn’t used to. It was only after Tomáš Řepka went abroad that I started playing regularly and, as one of the few, I played practically all the matches. That’s why I value the title from the last season the most. We became champions, we reached the round of 16 in the Champions League, in which we scored five goals against Spartak Moscow, for example. In addition, I signed for Kaiserslautern in April and then made it to the final nomination for the European Championship, where I played against the Dutch at home and half time against the French.”

The championship duel with the French naturally had to include a separate stoppage. Especially when the forty-five minute confrontation with the later European champions was the last appearance of Peter Gabriel in the jersey of the national team. The faulty pass that he sent into Henry’s scoring chance at the start of the match in Bruges stuck with him like a stigma…

“A person makes thousands of such passes during training sessions and matches, but under the pressure that we have to win against the French, I did not evaluate the mentioned situation well. And unfortunately for me and ours, the lurking Henry was smart. In addition, the ball hit badly, but it hit the post,” recalled Petr Gabriel twenty-four years ago.

“I didn’t get another opportunity in the national team. Not even in an ordinary friend’s house. At the same time, I spent the best part of my career in Germany. Coach Brückner probably put me in a negative box and never gave me a chance to show that it was a momentary mistake that I can correct and prove that I can play football.”

At the Sport.cz microphone, Gabriel also responded to the label of an excessively hard player, which he carried with him during his career.

“I was tough and uncompromising, but at the same time fair. I was just looking at the stats recently. I average 3.5 yellow cards per league season. But I’ve never been kicked out of the lineup because of them.”

In Kopačky na hříběk, of course, Gabriel’s engagement in Kaiserslautern, where he was brought down and hampered by constant injury, as well as five kets in the service of Bielefeld, which became a football tern for him.

“At Betzenberg it was the worst period of my career. First, I worked with my heel bone for half a year, then I tore my Achilles tendon and spent thirteen months in doctor’s offices and waiting rooms. I struggled, I was very unhappy, but I didn’t give up and continued to pursue my goal,” he recalls that everything came back to him later in Bielefeld and subsequently even after the end of his career.

Why does Petr Gabriel remember Bielefeld with such gratitude? What was hidden behind the fact that Arminia stayed on the Bundesliga scene for four seasons with a Czech defender in the squad, which it has never managed before or since? And what kind of team actually gathered then? This is also what Petr Gabriel talks about in Kopačky na hříběk.

And he also recalls that one of the returns to the city, where he worked for five years, helped him in business to the Champions League.

“We went to see the Christmas markets and while sipping a welder one of my friends told me about a business I might like. About industrial cleaning… I tried everything before. Photovoltaics and perhaps an exhibition of sports venues. I spent two years thinking about my friend’s idea, researching everything thoroughly, learning and finding out every detail. I made a good choice because I’ve been doing this business for ten years and I’m playing in the Champions League,” explained Petr Gabriel in one of the industrial buildings of the former Czechoslovak Army mine in Rynholec na Rakovnick, where his company is based.

“For sports, I brought what business likes. One hundred percent prepared person, active, who does not think about time. At first I worked practically non-stop because I was never lazy, now I have also entered the innovation sector. I deal with innovations, I invent devices that are waiting for international patents,” he talked about how football helped him in business and what his business entails.

But there were also customers and business partners who sometimes mistook him for the singer Gabriel, as well as for the football boots that he hung on a nail in the garage for good five years ago. This is to pursue business and regular travel to see his sons, who assure him that they will make it further in football than him.

Simply Kopačky na hříběk, this time with Petr Gabriel, is once again full of interesting reminiscences and narrations, which you will certainly enjoy listening to.

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