Kosovo and football: 10 years of triumphs that challenge politics and affirm national identity

By: Mentor Nazarko

Challenging parallels… with the world. Patriotism vs. footballing success

Germany’s Der Spiegel calls West Germany’s 1954 World Cup victory the true moment of the birth of the Federal Republic. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calls it the moment Germany found itself again; German political scientist Arthur Heinrich called it liberation from the guilt complex; the beginning of a new national self-confidence. Historian Hans-Joachim Teichler called it a contribution to the normalization of the nation. Meanwhile, the film “The Miracle of Bern” calls it a moral, familial and national rebirth. This is why public perceptions of football are stronger than academic analysis. Professor Artan Fuga, while poking fun in his own popularizing style at those on television who link football with patriotism after our defeat to Poland, was surely referring simply and solely to colleagues who attacked the footballers with grandiose and superficial terms—inflated and deflated.

The subject of sporting success linked to patriotism is a challenging one, and Kosovo today is surely the world’s best case study. For those who ask what we have to do with defeated Germany, let us turn to the comments about the million-strong crowd on the Champs-Élysées when France won the 1998 World Cup, where we will find even more enthusiastic terms: philosopher Edgar Morine wrote, what ecstasy over the unity of the republic rediscovered; while someone else called it the Republic’s spontaneous 14 July…

 Kosovar sport has won in 10 years, in parallel with a politics that is not winning

10 years ago, Fadil Vokrri, a football legend for both Serbs and Albanians, managed to bring Kosovo into UEFA and FIFA, perhaps (?) also making some use of his connections with the Serbian federation’s leaders, who put up little resistance. The Russians tried to use Kosovo’s membership precedent to seek UEFA’s admission of the Russian republiclets in Georgia, etc., but were rejected. As a result of Vokrri and Ademi’s diplomatic masterpiece, footballers—their young compatriots—could immediately challenge Russia in the group matches and reach the 2018 World Cup being held there. Would Kosovar footballers and fans have been granted visas? Yes, because in 2015, former judoka Putin had accepted Driton Kuka and Majlinda Kelmendi, passport and all. Majlinda won in the Russian city of Kazan, raised Kosovo’s flag there, and the Kosovar anthem was played in a hall where everyone present, including Putin, stood up.

10 years later, the sons of guest workers, under a flag devised by Westerners, have climbed 100 places in the global football rankings. They have filled three national teams with talent—Switzerland, Albania and Kosovo—and today are knocking on the door of the World Cup, this time in the USA. Serbia, the country that wanted to wipe out the Albanian race from its state, with a football academy famous in Europe, is swallowing the humiliation caused by Manaj’s goal in Serbia and the Kosovars’ success, complaining indignantly to UEFA that Kosovars make the eagle sign in Slovakia. What has happened in 10 years is truly a dream, created by a talented people who gained freedom, but endured a long period of visa isolation: today this people wants vindicating recognition on the world’s biggest stage, football. This is the triumph of the individual of Albanian stock, driven out by the Serbian occupier, or fleeing war or bad governance, who shines in Germanic systems governed with discipline and vision. Kosovo’s talents, nurtured by their often humble, hardworking fathers, once products of the Yugoslav football academy, and guided by German-Swiss coaches, are teaching a lesson not just to those who abused their parents, but to all of Europe.

Kosovo today is the Cinderella of the continent in football. But while football and judo have progressed so much in 10 years—or 27 years—building on the tradition of the former Yugoslavia, on the energy of independence and freedom, and led by Germanic coaches, where has the self-determination politics that ignores Western teachers got to? What has Kosovar politics done in these ten years? It has neither helped itself nor… football. It continues to squander the Western gift of statehood, first with the commanders’ class that wanted to rule forever, until some of them unjustly ended up in The Hague; and now with another group, captive to a mishmash of leftist, victimizing theories that challenge the very West that created Kosovo, continuing in this way to engage in a dialogue that never ends. It wants to share in football’s success with staged enthusiasm, heartfelt posts on social media, or bonuses, but it has not built even one stadium….

Kosovar football, as in Albania, has surpassed politics.

It is setting an example for politics in how to deal with the world, with the historic adversary, with countries that do not recognize it (remember Muriqi, and what a Kosovar bellwether he is for Spain with his success).

Who defeated Serbia in peacetime: politics or football?

Who made Kosovo known in countries that do not recognize it—politics or football?

I can already feel that the anti-globalist philosophers who command digital armies in the government’s service may steer the network’s popular likes in a Pristina-centric direction, so they can benefit by disparaging Tirana. Jealous neighbors will invest in intensifying intra-Albanian differences, politicizing them and continuing to wield the whiny weapon of victimizing the Serbian minority. Kosovar politics will try to claim credit it does not deserve, and it simply needs to be told: if you followed or even cooperated with the model of sport—the model of Majlinda and Driton in judo, of Zhegrova and Muriqi in football, or of Rita Ora and Dua Lipa in music—Kosovo’s political and state affairs would be in better shape. Politics did not even build a new stadium, despite grandiose promises to build one near somebody’s village, or its current indifference in the face of the pre-independence stadium in central Pristina falling into ruin.

Parallels between football, football… and the nation

The post-independence sport-politics parallel leads to another big question: a new state identity or a national identity? Can the new state and the new society sustain—and how will they manage—the grandeur of a possible success through qualification for the World Cup in America? Some things can initially be gleaned from the words of Kosovo Football Federation president Agim Ademi in an interview with Top Channel. A former Pristina player in the 1970s, assistant to the great Vokrri, and also an entrepreneur with life experience in Switzerland, Ademi has so far shown modesty, wisdom and iron discipline. He has never publicly opposed Albania’s federation, even though it has taken players from him. Now the reverse may happen, so Ademi, whose moment has emphatically arrived, called on Albanians from all lands to identify with Kosovo’s national team. He has wisely selected modest but firm German-Swiss coaches who have shown an ability to manage players with difficult personalities (remember Zhegrova among the reserves), and potentially managers and club executives as well. He has skillfully weathered the pressures of politicians who want to control him and who today can only remain silent in the face of Ademi’s success, hoping to benefit from the energy created by the success of a small people in a global competition watched by billions.

Kosovar football has stirred a powerful sense of collective belonging, which may be the strong beginning of a new national feeling. I am not referring to the squabbles on social media, like those between Lazio and Roma fans, about how we Kosovars know better than you in Albania how to play football, etc., etc. Nor do I expect, as Mandela included many white players in South Africa’s team, that we will have Serbian players in Kosovo’s national team, because Serbs led by Belgrade will not accept this team as their own. But I do expect that image-makers within Kosovo may attach themselves to this success, which distinguishes some parts of the nation from others while also forging a new identity, and try to ride its wave because they see themselves as modern-day national revivalists. Apologists for the Kosovar nation as a political project will inevitably find superficial nourishment to feed the social-media crowds.

So football is not just football: Kosovo won the war in 1999 with its own blood and NATO’s weapons, so it is not like Germany in 1954, which lost the Second World War. If defeated Germany was reborn through football, what can victorious Kosovo achieve? If France in 1998 rediscovered its black-blanc-beur unity (multi-ethnicity), what will Kosovo produce politically and nationally?

Let us wait for the match against Turkey—hopefully the weather holds, sparing the lads the mud of the former Yugoslav stadium—and see what the collective avalanche of reason, and unreason, brings together….