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From Patrick Jennings
BBC Sport at Pristina
All day that the word”miracle” kept coming up. These tens of thousands of people spilling out into the roads of Pristina have only seen yet another.
It was September 2016 when Kosovo played their first competitive football match.
They extended an unbeaten streak with their most important result yet – a 2-1 home triumph over the Czech Republic. It’s the longest such run in Europe.
Kosovo have an excellent likelihood of attaining Euro 2020. As well as their next qualifier is from England on Tuesday (19:45 BST). They are relishing the prospect.
This nation of roughly 1.8 million individuals campaigned for 2 years before being declared as Fifa and Uefa members at 2016. The process started immediately after its declaration of independence from Serbia. Some countries – including Serbia – still do not recognise its right to exist.
This a young and troubled nation from the heart of the Balkans should shine on the most significant phases of football wasn’t only one man’s dream. However, there is 1 figure who’s revered here over all others – and his story will help clarify the roots of this team.
He was critical to the campaign for recognition of Kosovo for a football state, also can be a hero in the country. After his death this past year at age 57, the team’s home floor was renamed in his honor: The Fadil Vokrri Stadium.
Like many individuals here, Vokrri’s life has been marked by the war that raged in this area. By the tensions between Albanians and Serbs, as well as the cycle of vengeance and counter-vengeance that still exist now.
And yet Vokrri was one of very few – perhaps the only real one – able to communicate around the deep divides which cost so many lives. Football was his language.
After Vokrri was made president of Kosovo’s Football Federation he was starting from scratch. His offices were two rooms in a Pristina apartment cube; 2 desks and two computers. It was 16 February 2008. The following day kosovo announced its independence.
Vokrri was in charge of a institution with no money, he had a federal group that didn’t have the right at an isolated nation with little infrastructure.
What he did was his standing. He was the best footballer Kosovo produced – although the new generation of talent that’s emerging may challenges soon that name.
He was charming, charismatic and convincing. He and secretary Errol Salihu would be the campaigners the nation needed.
“When we talked at home at the time, at the very beginning my father was thinking the process would be simple,” states Vokrri’s eldest son Gramoz, 33.
“Today we’re recognized as a country, it will be quickly, he said. He soon realised it would be anything but easy, but he didn’t mind it like that.”
Gramoz lives in Pristina. After he was old he would often accompany his father and assist with his or her work. Like his father, he is well known at Kosovo’s capital. Conversation is disrupted every five minutes as acquaintances and allies stop to say hello. Many remain. Are soccer agents government officials, and also generals from the Kosovo Liberation Army.
“My dad never left a political statement in his lifetime and just focused on football. Football is higher than everything else – that was his eyesight,” he states.
“It allowed my dad to help reach our aim – of entering Uefa and Fifa.”
Vokrri was an adventurous forward with two good feet. If he wasn’t the most prolific goalscorer his flair and determination made amends. He was adored by the fans. They recognized in him among the own – even if he wasn’t.
He climbed up from Podujeva, a little city that today lies close to Kosovo’s northern border with Serbia. Back then, just it had been a part of Yugoslavia. He had been created in 1960. During his childhood, Yugoslavia was a country composed of diverse nationalities, languages and religions, more or less held together by its own charismatic leader Josip Broz Tito.
It was an age when Kosovar Albanians like Vokrri were rarely celebrated. They seldom became symbols of Yugoslav satisfaction. But this ability was impossible to ignore.
Vokrri was the first to play for Yugoslavia – and he are the sole one. His debut came in a 6-1 defeat by Scotland and believed the goal, the first of six in 12 caps between 1984 and 1987.
He had started out at Llapi, his home club, before going to Pristina. In 1986 he moved on to Partizan Belgrade and remained for 3 decades -“the most beautiful” of his career,” he explained.
They won the league title in also the cup and 1987 1989. In between, Italian giants Juventus came calling – but Vokrri has been made to turn down them. He had not completed the then-compulsory two years’ army service, so couldn’t go overseas. He finished his duties while playing for Partizan, fulfilling light jobs during the week between games.
However, leave the nation he would, for reasons which were spiralling out of anybody’s control.
Many historians place President Tito’s departure as the vital point in the collapse of Yugoslavia. They say he left behind a power vacuum that would be full of resurgent equal nationalist factions.
Produced in 1986, Gramoz was the first of Vokrri and his wife Edita’s three children. By 1989, the family had decided they could remain in Yugoslavia no longer. Vokrri depended upon the Thought of departing for France. For Nimes, he signed in the summertime.
“At this time, everyone in Yugoslavia understood that war could happen,” Gramoz states. “They simply didn’t know when or where it would begin.”
Years of anguish would define another decade. Throughout the 1990s, Yugoslavia was plunged into a bloody battle in which as many as 140,000 people were killed.
From this combating emerged the different modern territories of now: Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and also the recently renamed North Macedonia. Kosovo was the last to declare itself an independent state.
Lulzim Berisha was 20 when he took up arms. He also joined the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). It was 1998.
For the previous six years he had been at Pristina, still residing under Yugoslav principle but enjoying soccer in what was an unofficial Kosovan top flight setup after the establishment of a separatist shadow republic there.
Matches were held on demanding pitches in rural areas. On sloping hillsides to observe fans would gather. The gamers would prevent on the way and detain them for hours. But they managed to get word up the street for the opposition. Players could wash their bodies in a nearby river.
When heavy fighting began in 1998 this soccer league ceased.
“I made a decision to combine the KLA because of my nation,” says Berisha. “I had no military experience but that I saw many bad stuff happening here. That was why”
There was now open conflict between the freedom fighters that the KLA and Serbian police of Kosovo. It resulted in a crackdown. Civilians were pushed out of their houses. There were atrocities, killings and expulsions at the hands of Serb forces.
The main turning point in the war arrived in 1999. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) had already intervened in Bosnia and it did in Kosovo. Even a 78-day bombing campaign forced Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic allow international peacekeepers in and to withdraw troops. Milosevic’s government dropped a year later. He would later be held in the United Nations (UN) war crimes tribunal for genocide and other war crimes carried out in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia. In 2006he had been found dead in his cell prior to his trial could be finished, 64.
After Serb forces left Kosovo in 1999, the land remained for nine decades under UN rule. Around 850,000 people had fled the fighting. An estimated 13,500 individuals were killed or went missing, according to the Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC). The HLC, with offices in Pristina and Belgrade, continues to concentrate on documenting the human price of Yugoslavia’s wars – including the civilian victims of Nato’s bombardment.
As peace returned into the region, so did lots of Kosovo’s refugees. Kids were called after then UK prime minister Tony Blair – left in Albanian as one first title: Tonibler. There’s enormous gratitude in Kosovo. Nowhere is it more obvious compared to Bill Clinton Boulevard at Pristina below.
Berisha utilizes few words to describe his life he observed.
He is one of the main personalities behind the largest fan club : Dardanet of the Kosovo national team today. The name means”that the Dardanians” – the people of an ancient kingdom that ruled here.
Dardanet have opened. Opposite an older tile mill whose chimneys rise into the sky, the call to prayer from a neighborhood mosque carries over lively conversation between the animated chain-smokers gesturing in their exterior chairs. The fuels are black espresso coffee and talk about football of any type. Serie A is the very passionately discussed. That would be the Premier League.
Lulzim stinks harshly as a staccato point at the end of each sentence that is brief on his teeth.
“We want every sort of people to arrive at the stadium. Every game we give 100 tickets free of female fans. We want families to develop,” he says.
With glee, a reel of tickets for the England game in Southampton is unfurled on the table next to people. They arrived that afternoon. The banks to journey will be through. Lulzim clarifies there will be a suit in Hounslow on Monday, England Fans FC against an English fan club, until the Euro 2020 qualifier in St Mary’s of Tuesday.
Inside, the walls are all packed high with framed photographs of Kosovo players, both old and new. The picture of vokrri is. They describe themselves as”Children of all Vokrri”. He’s become a legend to the fan club. They create banners, T-shirts and online posts that take his picture under messages for example:”Looking down on us.”
“Vokrri is a legend,” says Berisha. “He’s our hero. For everything he did. For the people.”
But pride of place in the fan club bar belongs to the match top worn by Valon Berisha when he scored Kosovo target in competition. That was a draw in Finland, a 2018 World Cup qualifier played in September 2016.
It was the culmination of several years’ hard work. Not so long afterwards, it looked like things would go downhill.
Vokrri returned from France to Kosovo roughly five years following the war ended. In 2008, Kosovo’s first attempts towards membership turned down with him at the helm. At that stage 51 of the UN’s 193 penis countries had just recognised the country. It appeared a majority would be required.
Rather, they continued to play with unofficial matches against unrecognised countries: Northern Cyprus, a team representing Monaco, a group representing that the Sami people of north Norway, Sweden, Russia and Finland.
The players in this time have been drawn almost exclusively in the national pool. Individuals who were forced to flee their homes just a few years ago, who had taken up arms and fought.
There was yet another manner. Tantalisingly out of reach.
“At 2012, if Switzerland played a match against Albania, 15 of those players on the pitch have been entitled to symbolize Kosovo,” Gramoz says.
“My dad was at the game, watching with Sepp Blatter, and the Fifa president. Mr Blatter said for my father:’How are you enjoying the game?’
“He responded:’It is like watching Kosovo A versus Kosovo B.'”
The significant step forward came from 2014, when Fifa allowed Kosovo to play friendly matches against its member nations – as long as certain conditions were fulfilled. There was opposition from Serbia.
Mitrovica was the place for the initial friendly game that is recognized of Kosovo. This town, with all nearby Albanian and Serbian populations divided in two by the Ibar river, still needs the presence of Nato troops now, 20 years from their birth as a peacekeeping force. Oliver Ivanovic, a prominent politician seen as a medium Kosovo Serb leader, was shot dead outside his party offices therein January 2018.
Albania goalkeeper Samir Ujkani decided to take a call-up, as did Finland international Lum Rexhepi, Norway’s Ardian Gashi and Switzerland’s Albert Bunjaku. The resistance were Haiti. It ended 0-0.
“As an example, it was a big, big victory,” says Gramoz.
“It was a crystal clear message in Fifa. The moment they enabled us to play friendly matches we took it to mean:’Don’t stop, you may go into as full members but we need time to prepare people.’
“Even if we didn’t have the right to play our national anthem, it is OK. We play with football. {That

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