Credit PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY SEAN WILLIAMS
On August 5th, in the ancient city of Elbasan, KF Skënderbeu Korçë became Albania’s first soccer club to reach the group stages of European competition since Communism fell, in 1991. The Albanian national side, too, having collected players from a huge diaspora, now finds itself above France, Mexico, and the U.S.A. in FIFA’s global rankings—it stands a fair chance of qualifying for next year’s European Championships. It would be the first major international success for Albania since it won the Balkan Cup, in 1946. Locals are beginning to hail a soccer renaissance.
Before Skënderbeu’s decisive match, I met up with Frederick “Alfredo” Ruco, a stocky septuagenarian, for a stroll along the Rruga E Kavajës, a scrum of shop fronts and busy cafés in Tirana’s city center. Alfredo was once hailed as the future of Albanian soccer, but he was forced out of the game by the Party of Labour of Albania (P.L.A.), the Marxist-Leninist regime of dictator Enver Hoxha, in 1959, when he was just twenty-one. Alfredo was excited for Skënderbeu’s game and its implications for Albania. “I couldn’t fight the regime,” he said, but the new players, he feels, are his “colleagues.” “I had a dream and never fulfilled it. I’m very happy about now.”
After Hoxha’s partisans routed Italy’s Fascists, and then the occupying Nazis, at the tail end of the Second World War, Hoxha began installing a government that turned Albania into a something like a Balkan North Korea. Beards were banned, as was religion. Seven hundred thousand bunkers were erected across the country. A network of gulags held thousands of political prisoners, many of them passing through the hands of the Sigurimi, a secret-police force that numbered some thirty thousand officers within a population that grew from 1.1 million to 3.1 million during the era.
Alfredo’s father, Tuqo Ruco, a veteran of anti-Fascist wars, was imprisoned. It was 1946, the year of Albania’s Balkan Cup victory. Tuqo’s brothers were both killed—one ambushed and shot, the other drowned. He was detained and interrogated for nine months.
Alfredo, then eight and the middle child of five, recalled the day that, at a detention center, he saw his father for the first time since the arrest. “He had been tall, very handsome, a good-looking man. He was forced to sleep standing up, in shackles, hands and feet.” Rawboned and hollow-eyed from months of torture, his father was barely recognizable. Alfredo stretched out a hand to touch him, but couldn’t reach. They would barely see each other again. Tuqo died in 1966, after twenty years in detention.
As we walked, Alfredo, pug-nosed and Popeye-armed, shook hands with friends and former soccer players, greeting them with hugs and traditional two-kiss welcomes. He showed me the home where his mother, Elpiniqi, provided shelter and clothing to those on the run from the P.L.A. After Tuqo’s capture, the family began pasting anti-Communist flyers around town. The kids were given poor marks at school. Alfredo was thrown out of a college engineering course. “The Party of Labour of Albania does not need students with a bad biography,” a tutor told him, he recalls.
Soccer became Alfredo’s means for escaping his apparent destiny. He was good, too: ambidextrous, with a fearsome aerial presence. He took his team’s penalty kicks, and says he scored every one. “Even now, if I’m playing,” he told me, “I won’t miss.” In 1953, at the age of fifteen, Alfredo was scouted by local giants KF 17 Nëntori Tirana. (Hoxha had renamed the team in honor of November 17th, the date that Hitler’s men were forced out of the capital.) He made his début soon after, scoring in a 3–1 victory in Elbasan, an hour’s drive away.
But Hoxha controlled every aspect of Albanian life, including sport. The following year, he ordered that the best players be sent to play for his newly founded clubs, Dinamo and Partizani Tirana. A friend of Alfredo’s brother, who served as party secretary at a local souvenir factory, grew worried. “Tell Fredi not to play football,” he warned. “I didn’t believe him,” Alfredo told me. “I was young.”
Alfredo was a gifted goal scorer, but he was a marked man. Teammates would speak about the Sigurimi in the dressing room. Some even suggested he should join. He would always demure, thinking back to his father’s ordeal. In 1959, after he’d been playing for Dinamo for three years, a member of the coaching staff approached him. “Don’t come here any more,” Alfredo recalls being told. “The Party of Labor doesn’t want you to play again.”
Alfredo wasn’t the only player to suffer a fate like this. The four Starostin brothers, who played for Spartak Moscow, were sent to Siberia in 1942, charged, first, with attempting to kill Joseph Stalin, then with “lauding bourgeois sports.” Georgian star Mikheil Meskhi was repeatedly denied transfers to western clubs, including Real Madrid, by a Kremlin scared of promoting “lesser” nationalities within the U.S.S.R. Lutz Eigendorf, an East German who fled to the West in 1979, was killed in a 1983 car crash later revealed to be a Stasi assassination plot.
And there were other Albanian players who fell afoul of Hoxha. Alfredo took me to a small, backstreet café to meet some of the old soccer friends he still spends days with. Nuri Bylyku, a wide-eyed raconteur, played with Alfredo at 17 Nëntori. He was forced off two flights to East Germany and the Netherlands, in 1958 and ’59. “I was on the plane,” he said, voice raised in anger. A stranger had approached him that day and asked, “Where are you going?” “With all the others,” Nuri replied. “If you play with Tirana,” he was told, “I will take your eyes out of your sockets.”
But Bylyku, despite having to stay home, forged a successful career. Alfredo, he said, “was stopped dead by political ignorance. We played together once in Elbasan. He scored two and I got one. Fredi was a very good player, with a flawless physique and enough intelligence to play modern soccer. He was a model.”
After the country cut ties with the Soviet Union, in 1961, and China, in 1978, its economy was devastated. Foreign travel was banned for all but a select few politburo members. Not surprisingly, the soccer teams had few successes then. Matches were rare, and when they did occur they were only against other communist states: China, Vietnam, East Germany. Albania is the only country to have boycotted four Olympic Games. It has never won an Olympic medal.
The Sigurimi would accompany players who did get the chance to travel abroad. Even so, some of those players managed to escape. In 1950, after an international match versus Hungary, defender Bahri Kavajës swam the length of Istanbul’s Bosporus strait to get away. He eventually settled in New Zealand. In 1987, Arvid Hoxha (no relation to Enver Hoxha) and Lulzim Bersheni escaped from an Athens hotel, en route home from a game in Finland. Bersheni’s family was banished to the mountainous northern region of Dukagjin. His team would not play in Europe again until the fall of Communism. Bersheni now coaches young players in Athens. “At every point we endured punishment,” he told me.
Alfredo thought he had his chance to travel in 1956, when he was called up to an international match against East Germany in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. The crisis in Suez, however, caused the game to be abandoned. “If I’d have been able to play that game perhaps I could have escaped,” he said.
After he was forced out of soccer, Alfredo worked as a car mechanic in Tirana. He married and had two sons. “I never wanted to see soccer again,” he told me, “because I had to go see players with technique not as good as mine.”
In 1985, at age seventy-six, Enver Hoxha succumbed to complications from diabetes. By then, Albania was the poorest country in Europe. Queues for milk snaked for blocks, and even hospitals had to survive on pitiful rations. “We only had ten eggs and one chicken per week,” Lluka Heqimi, a former surgeon and sports representative, told me. “How could we grow?”
Alfredo’s wife also died in 1985. Two years ago, his eldest son died unexpectedly of a stroke. “The tragedy of soccer was something I had to overcome,” he told me, his voice wavering for the first time in three meetings. “These other two, they were very difficult.”
Today, he spends most days at a small ice cream parlor on Tirana’s east side, sitting with his old friends and arguing over soccer. He still loves the game, and reels off dozens of modern stars he admires: Ronaldo, Messi, Zidane. His favorite player, though, is Loro Boriçi, who captained Albania to their 1946 Balkan Cup victory and spent two years at the Roman top-tier team Lazio. “In him, you could find everything: social well-being and a love for his country,” he said.
In 1991, as Tirana’s students went on hunger strike and the thirty-two-foot bronze statue of Hoxha was torn down in the Skanderbeg Square, a series of Ponzi schemes rose to prominence; by 1997, they had collapsed, ravaging the economy and sparking a civil war in which the government was toppled and more than two thousand people were killed. Weapons were looted from government caches, many of them sent north to Kosovo, for use in its war against Serbia. “It was worse than Communism,” Ermal Kuka, a local sports journalist, said. “Everybody had a gun. People were being shot for no reason. It was terrifying.” Around eight hundred thousand Albanians fled to the west, among them boys who would go on to play soccer in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere.
Regional divisions are still deep. Last October, at a qualifying game between Serbia and Albania, a drone was flown over Belgrade’s Partizan Stadium, displaying an irredentist flag of “Greater Albania,” including in its territory ethnically Albanian Kosovo. Serbian defender Stefan Mitrovic pulled the drone, and the flag, down onto the pitch. A brawl erupted, and the game was abandoned. Albania was later awarded a 3–0 walkover. The return leg, in Elbasan, will be played October 8th.
National soccer has otherwise been a source of unexpected pride in recent years. Gianni De Biasi, a former player in Italy’s top flight, was hired to manage the Albanian national team, in 2011. It was De Biasi’s task to bring talent back to Albania. FIFA’s eligibility rules are among soccer’s most contested decrees, thanks to the naturalization of foreigners by rich-but-deficient national sides, such as Qatar, as well as the decisions of players born in former colonial powers to play for the countries of their families’ origins.
De Biasi set off with a small team to convince western-raised players to switch allegiance to Albania. “At first it was very difficult, yes,” De Biasi told me, in the luxurious, air-conditioned lobby of the Kotoni Hotel. He was in Albania to see Skënderbeu, having watched the first leg via a digital decoder, at his house in Italy. Most of his squad ply their trade abroad but, he told me, he looks more and more to the local leagues for potential stars. Three and a half years on from his appointment, he said, it was becoming easy to attract talent. “When they see the situation changing, the players think, we work very well, this is important.”
Today, the side finds itself ranked twenty-second in the world—though it should be noted that the rankings are often mocked as irrelevant. (Wales, enjoying a mini-renaissance, is a lofty ninth; Slovakia, which has rarely made a dent on the world stage, is tied for fourteenth.) Of more significance is Albania’s position in its qualifying group for next year’s European championships. After five games it is in third place, level on points with Denmark and just one behind Portugal, the favorite. “Our world started three and a half years ago,” De Biasi said, cracking a smile. A nil-nil draw, away to Denmark in Copenhagen last night, has made qualification a little more likely.
After beating Portugal at a game in September, De Biasi joked that he should be awarded Albanian citizenship. Soon people localized his name to Gani Abazi. This March, the government gave him an Albanian passport.
Elbasan Arena stands at the foot of the Boulevard Qemal Stafa, flanked by green hills. Normally it is the home of the Albanian second-tier team KF Elbasani, but on August 5th it hosted KF Skënderbeu Korçë, whose smaller stadium, on the Greek border, cannot accommodate large-scale European competitions.
In 2011, Skënderbeu won its first Albanian Superliga title since 1933. It has won every year since, thanks in part to the largesse of local businessman Ardian Takaj, whose finances have furnished Skënderbeu’s squad with a host of South American and African journeymen. After years of Communist ruin, the club has found success with a tried-and-tested soccer formula: bags of cash.
This gave Skënderbeu their biggest date: battling Milsami Orhei, Moldova’s champion team, for a place in the Europa League, Europe’s second most prestigious competition. Skënderbeu had already won an away leg 2–0 , so anything short of humiliation at home would ensure progression to another game, the winner of which would enter the Champions League, the continent’s top tournament.
Ordinarily, Skënderbeu’s home crowds rarely top four thousand, but as darkness fell, almost eight thousand people marched down the Qemal Stafa decked in the club’s red and white. Security was tight: the previous week another Albanian club, Kukesi, suffered a penalty 3–0 loss to Legia Warsaw after one of their fans hurled a stone inside the Stadium, hitting a Warsaw player.
This one was barely a contest. After just fourteen minutes, Milsami’s Gheorghe Andronic was sent off for a dangerous tackle. Two minutes later, Albanian national striker Hamdi Salihi pounced to give the home side a 1–0 lead. Waves were rippling through the crowd long before the fifty-fifth minute, when Skënderbeu, breaking forward, added a second. When the referee signalled time, the stadium erupted.
The next morning, I met Alfredo at an old Italian villa-turned-restaurant in Tirana called Vila Goldi. He was happy, he said, that Albania was proving itself against Europe’s best. The Champions League was a step too far: on Tuesday night Skënderbeu were beaten, 4–1, by Croat team Dinamo Zagreb, who completed a 6–2 aggregate victory. Takaj paid out a five-hundred-thousand-euro reward to his squad upon their Milsami victory. The one million euros he pledged to vanquish Dinamo stays safe.
But his players can be satisfied with a group draw that includes heavyweights, including the Sporting Club of Lisbon, Istanbul’s Besiktas, and Lokomotiv Moscow. Alfredo, too, is looking to the future: he thinks his fifteen-year-old grandson, Serxhio, has what it takes to have the life he was denied. He’s created some homemade weights and is teaching Serxhio how to become fitter, leaner, stronger.
“Soccer is in my blood,” he said, sipping Turkish coffee. “For me it never stops.”
