On 27th March 1996, after playing several times for the National Under 21 and performing well for the Servette, David Sesa was chosen for the first time to play for the Swiss national team. Although the game played in Vienna against Austria ended in a disappointing 0-1 defeat, Sesa rejoiced over having been on the soccer field for 30 minutes.

A few weeks later, his joy doubled as coach Artur Jorge chose him to play at Euro 1996 in England. Despite some controversies lasting weeks, in the final round of the tournament the Swiss team got off on the right foot and achieved a 1-1 draw with England, the home team. After losing to Holland (0-2) and Scotland (0-1), however, the team was eliminated and Jorge resigned immediately. Unluckily, Sesa didn’t play in any of those matches. Nevertheless, in England he had the chance to get an extraordinary experience.

The 1998 World Cup qualifying draw passed Switzerland off as an easy rival to defeat. The first match played with the new trainer Rolf Fringer was a disaster indeed. On 31st August 1996, the Swiss team, which had clearly lost heart, lost 0-1 to the outsider Azerbaijan in Baku. This epochal defeat led observers to make not very flattering comparisons with the game Färöer Islands – Austria played six years earlier. The unexpected result had a negative effect on the rest of the qualification to the World Cup. The game against Norway, which would have then become the winner of the qualifying group, ended in a 5-0 defeat, the worst among all those accumulated in the previous 17 years.
In March 1998, coach Fringer was replaced by the Alsatian Gilbert Gress and the Swiss team missed the 2000 European Championship by a little: even though they had totalized the same points as Danemark (which placed second) along with the best goal difference, they had the worst results in the direct confrontations. Under the guidance of Gress, David Sesa scored his only goal in an international match, during the game played against Jugoslavia (1-1) in Belgrade on 2nd September 1998. In August 2000 the Argentinian Enzo Trossero took the leadership of the national team. However, he didn’t achieve the fixed target: the qualification for the World Cup 2002.

After Trossero resigned, Jakob „Köbi“ Kuhn was chosen as the new trainer. He himself played for the national team from 1962 to 1976. Furthermore, he had already led the National Under 21 before achieving success in August 2001,. After the first matches, the medias started considering Kuhn as a wrong choice. Despite this, in one year tine an uptrend was noticed again. With Köbi Kuhn, David Sesa played for the last time for the Swiss national team, during the match against Canada, in St.Gallen, on 15th May 2002. As for his first match against Austria, David performed on the soccer field for 30 minutes.

Statistics Nationalteam