Karim Haggui

Club

St. Gallen

Position

Defender

Nationality

Tunisia

Date of birth

1984-01-20

Birthplace

Kasserine, Tunisia

Height

1.90 m (6 ft 3 in)

Weight

82.54

Signing / transfer fee

Signed

Karim Haggui (Arabic: كريم حقي‎; born 20 January 1984 in Kasserine) is a Tunisian football defender. He currently plays for FC St. Gallen.

Club career
Early career
Haggui started his career in 1998 with AS Kasserine in his home town, eventually moving to Etoile du Sahel two years later and starting his professional career there in 2003. He only spent one season as a professional with Etoile du Sahel and moved to French club RC Strasbourg in the summer of 2004.

RC Strasbourg
Haggui made his Ligue 1 debut in Strasbourg's first game of the 2004–05 season, a 2–1 away defeat at SC Bastia on 7 August 2004, coming on as a substitute. He did not play very much in the first half of the season, but eventually managed to find his place as a regular in the final few months of the campaign, making a total of 20 Ligue 1 appearances in his first season with Strasbourg. The club also won the French League Cup that season and qualified for the UEFA Cup.

He started his second season with Strasbourg as a regular, scoring his only two Ligue 1 goals with a brace in the club's 4–2 defeat at home to Toulouse on 24 September 2005. After appearing in 11 consecutive league games since the beginning of the season, he lost his place as a regular, nevertheless managing to make a total of 23 appearances in the league that season. He also appeared in six UEFA Cup matches before Strasbourg were knocked out by Basel in the round of 16, scoring the opening goal in their 5–0 win at home to Grazer AK on 29 September 2005.

Bayer Leverkusen
Strasbourg were relegated to Ligue 2 following their 19th-place finish in the 2005–06 Ligue 1 season and Haggui decided to join German Bundesliga side Bayer Leverkusen in the summer of 2006 on an undisclosed fee.

Haggui made his Bayer Leverkusen debut on 29 July 2006 against Schalke 04 in the German League Cup, playing the entire match which Leverkusen lost 9–8 on penalties. He once again played the entire match on his Bundesliga debut in Leverkusen's first match of the 2006–07 season, a 3–0 win at home to Alemannia Aachen on 12 August 2006.

He experienced mixed fortunes in his first season with Leverkusen, playing regularly for the majority of the season, but also receiving a total of 11 yellow cards in the league and delivering a couple of poor performances, most notably against Bochum in April 2007, where he was substituted only 23 minutes into the game after being directly responsible for two of Bochum's three goals in the opening