FIFA’s membership grew as the United Nations’ membership did the same. The collapse of the former Yugoslavia alone created six new countries, each with a national football team that would become a vitally important tool in building a new national identity and projecting that out on to the world. Kosovo, though, was a unique case. A Swiss passport is one of the toughest, and the most sought after, in the world to obtain. Yet the war had seen Switzerland accept more than 300,000 Kosovars. ‘You have to make a choice: play for the national team of your origin or the country of your birth,’ Blatter says. ‘For Kosovo it was easy as they had no national team. They have no independence. Therefore the Kosovo players in Switzerland agreed to be Swiss.’ He was clear that Swiss concerns about losing their best players to a new Kosovo nation team – as that SonnstagsBlick front page had suggested – were unfounded. Fadil and Eroll had earlier told me that Kosovo was such a unique case that they hoped FIFA would allow a one-off nationality switch for Kosovar players if they chose to represent their new team. That seemed unlikely. ‘Even the day Kosovo becomes a full member of FIFA,’ Blatter says with certainty, as if it is a matter of when, not if, Kosovo will join. ‘If the players can recover their other nationality, this will not be possible [for them to play for Kosovo] as they have to protect the other national teams.’
Yet Blatter had taken on the issue of Kosovo’s limbo status, despite the fact that there was powerful political opposition to the move, in Russia and Serbia. ‘I’m a footballer and I’ve been working for thirty-seven years serving in football,’ he says. ‘I took the initiative to say let them play. At least let them play on the level of clubs and the level of youth teams. Here we are at the end of the first step. I said we have to do something. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.’ He sounds genuinely upset by the restrictions imposed on the Kosovars, especially the youth players whose careers have been hampered by the political bickering. I begin to believe him. ‘We had the political opposition from Serbia before their [parliamentary] elections. But the elections are over now. There aren’t any hurdles,’ he continues. ‘They still think in Serbia there will be some security problems as there is a Serb minority in Kosovo,’ he explains, pointing out that by FIFA’s threshold, there was sufficient international recognition already for Kosovo to become a full member, as Palestine had. ‘But yesterday there was a decision at the UN that there will be no more supervision [of Kosovo’s government]. So we can play now.’
The biggest hurdle for Kosovo’s quest for footballing recognition, though, wasn’t FIFA. It was UEFA, and in particular Michel Platini. Ever since the legendary French former player was elected president of European football’s governing body, he had been lauded as Blatter’s eventual successor as FIFA president. He was a football man, his supporters insisted, a man who had played the game at the highest level and knew football in a way that Blatter could only dream of. As head of UEFA he was also in charge of the Champions League, the world’s most lucrative club competition. The friction in recent years between clubs and national teams had become open warfare. The wealthy clubs from Spain, Germany, France and especially England resented the fact that their property, their investments (the players) were being used to feather FIFA’s nest through the World Cup. Platini was a man, they reasoned, who would fight for their interests. Blatter, they said disparagingly, seemed more interested in football in China or Saudi Arabia than in the region that was still the economic and cultural driver of the global game.
The two had clashed repeatedly and were now playing cat and mouse, a game of veiled criticisms and back-handed compliments. The FIFA presidential elections were due to be held in 2015 and unofficial campaigning had begun. ‘I have just seen this morning, that the opposition [to Kosovo’s recognition] has always come from UEFA but I just had this ...’ Blatter passes me a printout of an article from Inside World Football by sports journalist Andrew Warshaw: ‘Platini Gives Kosovo Fresh Hope’ reads the headline. In it Platini seems to suggest that Kosovo might be able to play friendly games in the future after all, while reiterating his belief that Kosovo can’t join without UN membership. Blatter gives a satisfied, almost condescending smile. ‘I am happy that my colleague Michel Platini has now abandoned his very strong position,’ he says, insisting I keep the article. ‘That’s for you. I talked with him, and he is a footballer. It is wrong, I told him, to hinder footballers playing football. He said: “No, I am fully with you. I am a footballer but these are the sacrosanct [UEFA] statutes I have [to work with]”.’
Blatter is now warming to the theme of chiding his proxy opponent. The issue of Qatar’s 2022 World Cup finals is another that Platini had been troubled by. The fallout from the vote had seen a level of scrutiny over the process that was unique for FIFA. Issues of alleged vote buying, vote swapping and political pressure had been raised. France Football ran an investigation into the vote and the strong links between Qatari money and the French government. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund had bought Paris Saint-Germain, turning it overnight into one of the richest clubs in the world. On the eve of the World Cup vote, in November 2010, Platini was invited to the Elysée Palace for a meeting with then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a PSG fan. The Crown Prince of Qatar, who was later to become Emir, was also there. Platini denied that any pressure had been put on him to vote for Qatar, but he admitted that he had voted for the bid even if he later said he wanted the finals to be played in winter rather than in summer, as planned, where a Persian Gulf summer regularly hits 50 degrees Celsius. ‘This is his approach and, first of all, it was a secret ballot and if it’s a secret ballot you should not disclose who you are voting for. This is a democratic principle,’ Blatter says in perfectly judged mock annoyance. ‘Secondly, the location of the World Cup in Qatar is still clear in our books: Qatar in June, July 2022. That is it.’
Blatter is a man of perpetual movement. One former wife described how the marriage foundered because he was ‘married to football’. Insiders had told me how he works fourteen hours a day. His energy, at the age of seventy-six is remarkable. By the time the 2015 FIFA presidential election takes place he’ll be seventy-nine. If he stands, and wins again, he’ll be eighty-three when his term ends. But those discussions are for another day. He has another appointment to go to and shakes my hand before leaving on his never-ending conveyor belt of handshakes and platitudes. In a few weeks the issue of Kosovo being allowed to play international friendlies will again go before FIFA’s executive committee. Blatter is upbeat. Platini has come around to his way of thinking, he says, and he believes that his executive committee could even go further than merely approving friendlies. He hints at something far bigger on the horizon. ‘There is a fascination of the game which we can’t explain,’ he says before he leaves. ‘Football gives you balance when you have no balance in your life.’ It wasn’t clear whether he was talking about Kosovo or himself.
**
Eroll is driving a little too fast around the winding roads of the Swiss countryside. The single-lane track meanders uphill, through fields that look so Swiss they are almost a pastiche: a chocolate-box view of wooden chalets with white smoke rising from their chimneys and cows with bells around their necks chewing in the pastures. We arrive at what looks like one of the most expensive hotels in the world. The Swiss national team are staying here to prepare for their World Cup match against Albania. Fadil, Eroll and I get out of the car, straighten our jackets and walk with a false confidence in the hope that the doorman won’t realise that we don’t really belong here. Fadil is the most confident, and strides through the open door first, Eroll less so. The doorman eyes me suspiciously as I walk past him last. Perhaps he suspects we are arm dealers, too. Or perhaps he has seen the hole in the sole of my right shoe. It is getting late and the sun is setting on a terrace with an incredible panorama: a lake spread out in a valley below. The last of the Indian summer sun is still warm, but the wind is cool, an early harbinger of winter. We order the cheapest things on the menu, Diet Coke and coffee, and we w
ait until nightfall. Fadil’s phone rings. The players are ready to receive us.
We walk through the hotel’s maze of corridors, past the waiters in immaculately starched aprons, to the end of the building: an Arab-style shisha lounge. Half the Swiss team is waiting for us. Sitting on the Moroccan-style sofa is Bayern Munich’s Xherdan Shaqiri, Borussia Mönchengladbach’s Granit Xhaka, Napoli’s Valon Behrami and Dynamo Kiev’s Admir Mehmedi. Fadil greets each of them warmly in Albanian. Eroll is behind, shaking hands and laying out his declaration on the table in front of them. Each of the players signs it without hesitation. Xherdan Shaqiri is the first. It has been a tough day for the Bayern Munich winger in the papers. It was his face on the front page of SonntagsBlick, the newspaper that had outlined the damage a Kosovo team could do to Switzerland. And it was his face on almost every one of the thirteen pages that followed it. ‘Yeah, the Swiss papers are always like this,’ Shaqiri says. ‘The big paper was on me. “Maybe we’ll lose Shaqiri.” But now we don’t have a team. Kosovo doesn’t have a team in FIFA. And for the time being I play for Switzerland.’ Shaqiri, like almost all the Swiss players of Kosovar descent of the same age, was born there, in the town of Gjilan in eastern Kosovo. Shaqiri’s allegiance, like that of all of Switzerland’s foreign-born players, had been questioned both directly and indirectly. But the issue was far more complex than that for Shaqiri. ‘My mother and father are 100 per cent from Kosovo, my name says to all that my name is not from Switzerland and is from Kosovo and I was born in Kosovo,’ he says when I ask how he would describe his identity. ‘But after I was born I came here with my parents. I made my school here, played my first football here. For me it was always that I play for Switzerland. If I play, I play for Switzerland.’
It is a sentiment shared by all the players: pride in their homeland and their heritage, but also pride in the country that raised them and gave them opportunities they would never have dreamt of back in Kosovo. Valon Behrami left Kosovo when he was four years old and barely remembers anything except certain family comforts and a feeling of great loss. ‘I remember I used to go to my grandma and play with a cat and a dog,’ he recalls of his early days. He wears a tattoo of the flag of Kosovo on his forearm. ‘These are the only things I remember. Coming to Switzerland I remember being very cold and very sad. I missed the family and I missed all the kids who were all playing football together. It was just me, my mother and father and my sister.’ Behind every refugee is an extraordinary story of war, escape and struggle. Each player, like every Kosovar family, has there own. Behrami, like the rest of the players, even Fadil and Eroll, doesn’t dwell on what he lost during the war. ‘Switzerland gave me a lot of opportunity,’ Behrami says, articulating the complex feeling of belonging and gratitude and identity that sits within refugees who thrive in their adopted home. ‘Everything that I have today is thanks to Switzerland. They gave me school and an opportunity to play football. What can I say? I’m very thankful to Switzerland.’ All the players know that a word out of place will make headline news in Switzerland, especially ahead of the Albania match. Which makes their agreement to sign Fadil and Eroll’s pledge all the more surprising. ‘I feel in part of my life that I am a Kosovar from Kosovo,’ Behrami explains tentatively. ‘In other parts of my life I feel like I am from Switzerland. When I am in a struggle, I think of the people and the war and I start to fight. When I feel good and I feel like I have everything and I feel happy, I control this like Swiss people, too.’ Even though Behrami supports the creation of the Kosovo team, and has signed a petition to help, he doesn’t believe he’ll ever play for the team, even if he’s allowed to. ‘It is like a dream for us to see Kosovo play and to see the T-shirt with blue and gold,’ he says. ‘It is going to happen with the next generation. I want to give my help and do everything to make this dream come true, but this is for the next generation.’
Others have different opinions. Shaqiri is proudly Swiss, but would consider playing for Kosovo, depending on their circumstances. ‘When Kosovo plays in FIFA I will look and see how many players will play for Kosovo,’ he says. ‘But for now it is not a problem.’ Granit Xhaka, another talented young midfielder, is even more certain he will one day play in the Kosovo national team. Unlike Shaqiri, Granit and his younger brother Taulant, an equally talented young winger for FC Basel, were born in Switzerland after his parents fled Yugoslavia. ‘Yes, of course,’ he says when I asked whether he would consider playing for Kosovo. ‘I don’t know when Kosovo will have a national team. Two, three or five years’ time. We have three players here who could play. For now we play for Switzerland, but later we will see what will happen.’ First comes the Albania game. Switzerland have already won their first match in European qualification a few days before, a 2-0 victory against Slovenia. Granit Xhaka scored Switzerland’s first goal but the star of the team was Xherdan Shaqiri. ‘We are waiting for this match for six months,’ he says of the Albania game before we leave, Eroll gathering the petition and holding it as if it is a winning lottery ticket. ‘There will be more problems when we go to Tirana. The fans are little crazy. They are very loud.’ He would hear in a few days’ time exactly how loud the Albanian fans would be.
**
Lucerne, Switzerland
The Albanian’s team hotel couldn’t be more different from their Swiss opponents’. It is situated in the heart of the city of Lucerne and is being swamped by Albanians in red and black jerseys. The lobby is a chaotic mix of film crews, fans, players, models, ex-models, families, lovers, bemused Taiwanese tourists and Swiss businessmen. An Albanian sports TV station has even constructed its studio in the lobby, broadcasting live from amidst the turmoil. Fadil Vokrri is greeted warmly by the president of the Albanian federation, as well he might be, given how many Kosovar players will turn out for Albania tomorrow. But he reserves the warmest greeting for Agim Cana, the father of current Albanian captain Lorik Cana. Agim and Fadil had played in that great FC Prishtina side of the mid-1980s.
While Fadil meets old acquaintances, Eroll works the room. He is sitting next to Lorik Cana passing him the petition that Shaqiri, Behrami and Xhaka signed the previous day. Like them, Cana also fled to Switzerland as a young boy when the civil war broke out. ‘I lived in Switzerland for ten years,’ he says after he signs the form and hands it back. Eroll disappears quickly, off to farm as many signatures as he can before tomorrow’s match. It might have been a homecoming of sorts for Cana, but he had none of the split loyalties that the Swiss players had. ‘From the start it was clear I would play for the Albanian national team,’ he says, definitely. ‘I would not play for another nation.’ Perhaps it was the Cana family’s earlier experiences in Switzerland that shaped Lorik’s views. As political refugees they had to renew their visa every six months, never knowing if this one was to be their last. Perhaps it was the fact that he was signed by PSG as a sixteen-year-old and moved to France not long after getting to Switzerland. Either way, Cana’s view of his heritage was one of a wider Albanian identity. Many Albanians still believed in a ‘Greater Albania’, claiming much of the territory surrounding the country, including parts of Serbia proper, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo and even Greece. Kosovo was the only ethnically Albanian territory that had any real claim to independence. But Cana saw the Albanian national team as an alternative to an unlikely dream of a Greater Albania. ‘When we are part of the Albanian national team, we represent all the Albanians around the world not just those in Albania,’ he explains. ‘More than half of the nation live around the state. When we are part of this national team we make something unique and amazing. We make a union between all our people and the national team is the only thing that does that.’ The injustice of his homeland not being acknowledged, despite close to one hundred countries recognising it, was of immediate concern. Which was why he agreed to sign the pledge. ‘It is difficult if you are not recognised by the world,’ he says. ‘The United Nations and football is the same thing. The country deserves to be recognised as a country, as a state and to
be recognised in football as well. They deserve to play football.’
Would you play for Kosovo, if Fadil, Eroll and the Football Federation of Kosovo requested it, I ask.
‘They already asked me,’ he replies, although he turned down the request. ‘When you say the national team, I already represent and play for my nation. Sure, I was born in Kosovo. One day we want to have all the Albanian players in the world play for one team.’ I’m not sure this is what Fadil and Eroll had in mind when they approached the Albanian team for their support. But Cana makes one final point that everyone can agree on. Switzerland are the favourites and Albania are massive underdogs who have never qualified for the finals of any major tournament. ‘We would be a great team,’ he says of his dream for a Greater Albania national team. ‘We would qualify for the World Cup.’
Eroll has everything he needs for the time being. His petition is full of names, as he had planned. We wait to leave, but Fadil is still occupied. Groups of Albanian fans are taking it in turn to have their pictures taken with him. We wait an hour until he is finished.
**
The Swissporarena does not look or feel like a home crowd. In one hour’s time the 2014 World Cup qualifier between Switzerland and Albania will begin but there are few Swiss flags being flown. Rather, it is the red flag with black eagle of Albania that is on display. But among the red and black is the blue and gold of the Kosovo flag. Many have come with the two sides fused together – one half Albanian, one half Kosovar: flags, scarves, T-shirts, painted faces. T-shirts proudly declare the desire to form a Greater Albania, showing a future superstate stretching from Greece into Serbia. The match has been declared as ‘High Risk’ by the Swiss authorities given that the Swiss fans will be in the minority. But the crowd is not aggressively anti-Swiss. Almost no one has travelled from Albania or Kosovo to be here. Everyone, it appears, already lives in Switzerland.
Thirty-One Nil Page 20
