Ticket to the big time
Historic encounter in Champions League
The two men in green shirts were called into action at the last minute, but they were doing a brisk trade. Sitting at a plastic table in the main square of Mitrovica in Kosovo they have in front of them four piles of tickets for an historic match in the city. They have just two days to shift them.
“We have tickets for €€2, 4 or € 7,” says the shorter of the two men, as a steady stream of fans pass by, buying tickets for friends and family. His leather purse is stuffed with Euros, perhaps explaining why a security guard is standing next to them, eyeing each customer as they approach.
Over the past few years the word “historic” has prefaced almost every football match connected to Kosovo. There was the historic first international against FIFA opponents – a goalless draw against Haiti – in this same city, in 2014. In 2016 there was the historic decision to admit Kosovo into UEFA and FIFA, despite huge political opposition from Serbia, who still sees Kosovo as part of both its history and territory. A few months later the Kosovo national team played its historic first competitive match, a 2018 World Cup qualification match against Finland.
And now tickets are being sold for Kosovo’s historic first-ever men’s Champions League match on home soil, where the reigning champions Trepca ’89 take on Vikingur of the Faroe Islands. And the only way to buy tickets for the game is here, off a patio table in the city centre, in cash. Over the course of one Sunday afternoon, nearly half of the 16,000 available tickets for the game at the Olympic Stadium Adem Jashari will be sold. Everyone is confident of victory.
“We will win 1-0,” says the taller man behind the patio table, who is wearing the club’s green-and-white home shirt. “And yes, Trepca will go to the next round.”
Just a few weeks after the Champions League Final in Cardiff saw Ronaldo score twice and Real Madrid clinch back-to-back titles for the first time in the modern era, the competition has returned. The first qualifying round is truly a minnows affair, with the champions of Kosovo joining those of Northern Ireland, Wales, Gibraltar, Estonia, Armenia, the Faroe Islands, Malta, San Marino and Andorra.
As a new member with a coefficient of zero, Kosovo is ranked last. Its teams could have entered UEFA competition last season but the stadiums didn’t meet the strict licensing requirements. However, after significant investment in a ground that was built originally in the late 1970s during the Yugoslav days, and which once hosted a European Championship qualifier against Romania, Kosovo finally has a stadium fit for purpose.
Trepca ’89 were the runaway winners of the Superliga – while FC Pristina, who dazzled the Yugoslav First Division in the mid-1980s, qualified for the Europa League – and their story is steeped in Kosovo’s past conflicts.
The club’s name comes from the Trepca mines underneath the city and their mineral wealth worth billions. The silver that adorned the robes of Byzantine emperors was cleaved from the ground here eight centuries ago, with the Germans requisitioning the mines during World War Two and digging up 30 per cent of the Nazi’s entire lead. By the 1970s the mines employed 15,000 people and gave the city of Mitrovica incredible wealth.
However, when Yugoslavia began to fall
apart and the wars came, the mines played a crucial role, with some arguing that the conflict was really about who controlled Kosovo’s mineral wealth. Albanian miners became a radical opponent to Belgrade’s rule, leading to an underground hunger strike that turned the miners into heroes. After the war the city was eventually split: Kosovar Albanians living south of the Ibar river, with Kosovar Serbs to the north. A detachment of Italian Carabinieri still patrols the main bridge that crosses the river.
Today the mines are split north and south, and work at a fraction of their capacity. The city also has three football teams bearing the Trepca name.
So, today, there’s a KF Trepca, who were relegated from the Kosovo Superliga last
season, an FK Trepca that plays in the fourth tier of Serbian football, and Trepca ’89, whose roots go back to a team called Rudari, who were formed in 1945 but changed their name in honour of the miner’s strike. All three sport an almost identical green-and-black badge that has the iconic Trepca mine symbol at its heart.
“The history of Kosovo’s football is among the most painful in the world. I would say it’s unparalleled,” says Xhavit Kajtazi, an author and Kosovan football historian. Given the talent playing for other national teams, Kajtazi believes that “Kosovo would be unbeatable in Europe and in the world today, but we are unlucky and have not had the chance to see them
playing for the country of their origin”.
The Riza Lushta stadium, named after kosovo’s first superstar footballer, who played close to 200 serie A games and scored over 80 goals in stints at Juventus and Napoli from 1939 to 1945, sits next to the Ibar river that divides the city. It is home to Trepca ’89 but is in poor shape. A concrete, one-step terrace is crumbling at the edges and overgrown with moss and weeds. The wall behind it is topped with rusting barbed wire. There are no floodlights. But a small crowd has turned up to watch Trepca ’89 train in the fading light, the day before arguably the biggest game in the club’s history.
The chairman of Trepca ’89 is Abedin Zeka and he is also in the crowd, watching the team he has funded for 20 years. “In 25 years we were out of football and had no money but now we will play in Europe,” he says, managing to sound both surprised and proud. Zeka runs a taxi company in the city and has been in charge during those years when Champions League football looked very far away. “We waited 25 years for this,” he says. “We sacrificed for it. And now we are living our dreams.”
With recognition and European competition, the modern game is beginning to take root in kosovo, bringing big changes. Even at the Champions League qualification stage the money Zeka receives from UEFA is transformational. Just for reaching this stage the club receives € 260,000 from UEFA as representative champions, and then a further € 220,000 for playing in the first round. Zeka explains that the UEFA’s money is easily five times the entire budget of their nearest rivals.
The money and the exposure also attracts agents, who are both looking for a diamond in the rough – kosovo international Milot Rashica was discovered by Dutch club vitesse, a winger playing for nearby FC vushtrria – and as a shop window for their players looking to move to bigger, more lucrative leagues.
“I didn’t know anything about kosovo, I couldn’t imagine what it looked like,” says kabba sambou, a 20-year-old centre-back from Gambia. sambou, who was called up to the Gambia national team last year, was spotted playing by an agent in the senegalese league who then contacted the club. He explains of his move: “I wanted a bigger league but my agent said: ‘this is your first time in Europe. This is good. You come and have experience in European football and if you perform you might have the chance to move to a bigger league’. Everyone wants to play in the Champions League.”
The most successful import, however, has been Nigerian striker John otto, who scored 27 goals for Trepca ’89 after moving on loan from Albania’s kF skenderbeu. He was discovered playing second division football in Lagos by the club’s well developed network of scouts. “I never thought I’d be in kosovo,” says otto. “I thought I’d go to a top club.”
The cold has been a shock, otto says, and he has been surprised by some of the difficulties in getting to and from a nation still not recognised officially as a country by the UN. When Trepca ’89 travelled to the Faroe Islands for the first leg, which they lost 2-1, the team had to take a flight to Denmark and two overnight trains before making it back to Pristina. “This is
where I am,” says Otto after training had finished. “Tomorrow I can be anywhere in the world. I need to prepare myself.”
Vikingur were also in their first Champions League campaign, having won their first championship. Their team is made up of part-time players and captain Atli Gregersen, who is also the captain of the national team, works in the Faroe Islands unemployment office. However, with the economy doing well, there aren’t many vacancies at the moment.
“Yes, there isn’t much to do!” he laughs. “The mackerel industry is doing really well. If I could get onto one of those trawlers I’d be gone. You can get € 200,000 a year! We’re in the wrong business.”
The players had no idea what Kosovo would be like when they got here. “I watch the BBC and CNN at home so I thought it was a nightmare draw.
"Obviously the team was from the former Yugoslavia so they could pass the ball. Was it still a war zone?” says Gregersen, who soon realised he was safe when he arrived and saw Pristina’s cafe-lined boulevards full of people near his hotel.
For Vikingur the UEFA money was also a huge bonus. While the owner of Trepca ’89 was going to use the cash to pay his players more and attract best players, Gregersen had more modest goals. “It is two years budget for us,” he says. “So who knows, maybe we’ll get a new shower in the dressing room. We’re living the dream without the money!”
For one Vikingur player, the match had added significance. Attacking midfielder Filip Dordevic, who is now 23, was born in Belgrade and moved to the Faroe Islands when he was 15, following in the footsteps of his father, Aleksandar, who played over 60 times for Partizan Belgrade.
“It’s a funny story. My dad wanted to finish his career and thought he was going to Egypt,” Dordevic says of his father’s move to the islands in 2001. “When you say ‘Pharaoh’ you think Egypt. But when he landed in the ‘Faroe’ Islands he saw rain and wind and fish!”
The ticket sellers in the centre of Mitrovica couldn’t quite shift all 18,000 tickets for the match in the end, but it was close. Just over 15,000 supporters filled the newly renovated stands of the Olympic Stadium Adem Jashari – which is named after a founding leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the insurgent group hailed as liberators by Albanians but as terrorists by Serbs. Jashari was killed along with his family in a shoot-out before the war began. The crowd applauded as one of Jashari’s successors in the KLA took his seat. Former prime minister Ramush Haradinaj was a KLA commander in western Kosovo and has twice been acquitted for war crimes in The Hague. He was recently arrested in France on an Interpol red notice issued by Serbia for alleged crimes during the war, causing a diplomatic incident after he was released.
Supporters had come from all across Kosovo and many had travelled from Sweden, Norway and Germany. Two dozen miners, dressed in overalls and hard hats, had marched to the stadium after their shift had finished down the Trepca mine.
The game began in warm sunshine but the host’s Champions League campaign soon began to crumble. Nigerian striker Otto was on the bench, replaced by a young Kosovar striker Blerand Kurtishaj, making his debut, who was sent off within half an hour for two stupid yellow-card challenges while chasing down the ball. By the start of the second half, Vikingur were 4-0 up. When the fourth goal went in, the crowd began to chant “shame, shame”. Otto was brought on late in the game but it wasn’t enough and Víkingur won 4-1.
Kosovar journalists wait for the Trepca ’89 players, almost all of whom ran past, unwilling to talk, pulling their shirts over their heads. “Everybody was feeling very bad,” says coach Zekirija Ramadani, a former Macedonia international who’d been in charge since the start of the year.
“We lost only one game. We didn’t lose a life. We need to get back to playing football.”