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Europe had barely made itself comfortable as it settled down for Italy vs Albania on Saturday, before the whole game was tipped on its head.
Twenty-three seconds had passed when Federico Dimarco made a terrible mess of a throw-in on the Italy left, aiming for Alessandro Bastoni in his own area but badly undercooking it. Bastoni stood frozen as a flash of Albanian red appeared in front of him, intercepted the ball and rocketed a shot into the near top corner.
Goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma looked around like a man who had just opened a taxi door only for someone else to jump in and speed off. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
Perhaps the Italians should have known. After all, the scorer of the goal that broke the record for the fastest ever in European Championship history does play in Italy. But of all the Serie A stars in Germany this summer, Nedim Bajrami probably wasn’t among those predicted to set records.
“Scoring for Albania in a European Championship has been a dream for me since I was a child,” said Bajrami after the game. “I have worked very hard for it.”
Nedim Bajrami scores against Italy after 23 seconds (Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
He isn’t kidding. Bajrami is one of 19 players in the Albania squad at Euro 2024 who were born outside of the country, but few of them have been through such an onerous process to earn their spots.
In fact, he had to go to court to be allowed to play for the country.
Bajrami was born and raised in Switzerland — Zurich, specifically — to ethnically Albanian parents. He joined his local team, Grasshoppers, as a boy and came through the ranks, making his senior debut in 2017.
He also earned an international call-up, to the Switzerland youth teams, playing for them at every level from under-15s to under-21s. He even captained them a few times, including in one under-19s international against a Germany team featuring Kai Havertz, now of Arsenal.
But while this would usually represent a textbook path to the Swiss senior team, there was always something pulling Bajrami in another direction.
It all started when Edy Reja, the Italian who coached the Albanian national team from 2019 to 2022, approached Bajrami about switching allegiances in 2021. As such, he turned down a call-up to the Switzerland Under-21s squad for that year’s European Championship.
“We tried to convince Bajrami to continue playing for Switzerland,” said Mauro Lustrinelli, then Switzerland Under-21s coach. “But he told us that his heart beats for Albania. For us in the national team, identification is one of the main values, so we had no choice but to let him leave.”
Nedim Bajrami says Albania is the country of his ‘heart’ (Linnea Rheborg/Getty Images)
The problem was that, at the time, Bajrami didn’t actually have Albanian citizenship. But in addition to all the trappings of wealth, fame and adoration, one of the perks of being a footballer is that when some bureaucratic process is in the national interest, you can go straight to the top.
Ilir Meta, then president of Albania, approved Bajrami as an Albanian (along with then Fulham youngster Adrion Pajaziti) in March 2021, theoretically smoothing his path to the national team.
But even a presidential decree wasn’t enough to convince FIFA. Despite them relaxing rules around players who wanted to switch national allegiances, the sticking point in Bajrami’s case was that, while he clearly had familial connection to Albania, he didn’t have formal dual nationality at the time he played for the Swiss youth teams. Technically speaking, in the opinion of FIFA at least, he needed to have an Albanian passport from a young age in order to qualify.
They rejected his request to switch, then turned down his appeal too, partly on the basis that he had played four times for the Switzerland Under-21 team after turning 21. So the player took his case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, essentially claiming that FIFA were being needlessly prescriptive in how their rules were applied.
Bajrami and the Albanian federation cited ‘Article Nine of the Rules Governing the Application of the FIFA Statutes’, which essentially says that a player can apply once to change allegiances, providing they held nationality for the new country and that they had not played in a senior competitive game for the old country. The contention was that FIFA’s initial rulings in Bajrami’s case were an overly strict interpretation of that statute.
And CAS agreed: they ruled in favour of Bajrami and Albania on August 30, 2021, broadly basing their decision on the fact that he had only represented Switzerland at youth level. Reja wasted very little time in calling up his new recruit, and Bajrami made his debut in a World Cup qualifier against Hungary a week later.
“I decided to play for Albania after listening to my heart,” Bajrami said after the ruling was made.
That Bajrami scored such a prominent and, indeed, historical goal is perhaps not a huge surprise. Even his most strident advocates would struggle to argue that he is a consistent player, but he is one for a big occasion. He scored a screamer against Czech Republic in the qualifiers, spinning around 30 yards from goal and hammering a shot into the top corner. That was the equaliser in a 1-1 draw, and helped Albania secure top spot in their qualification group.
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He has also gained a bit of a reputation for popping up with big goals at club level. Bajrami moved to Italy in 2019, initially signing for Empoli and then moving to his current club, Sassuolo, in 2023.
He has only scored 10 goals in Serie A, but five of them have come against Milan, Inter, Lazio and Roma. He helped Sassuolo do the double over Inter last season, as well as beating Juventus last season, but that wasn’t enough to avoid relegation to Serie B.
Still, no matter how many big goals he manages for his club teams, few will beat his 23-second strike in Dortmund. And there will be few moments that a player has fought harder for.
(Top photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images)