One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Can a 13-year-old satirical ska song and a 40-year-old striker make history for Bosnia and Herzegovina?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group B preview. You can also read previews of Canada, Qatar, and Switzerland.
Can a 13-year-old satirical ska song and a 40-year-old striker make history for Bosnia and Herzegovina?
Edin Dzeko scored the wrong goal.
In 2012, with a historic first Premier League title slipping through Manchester City’s fingers, Dzeko headed in a dramatic stoppage time equalizer to keep their hopes alive. At the time, it was probably the most consequential goal in the club’s history.
The problem is that two minutes later, Sergio Aguero scored the actual most consequential goal in the club’s history, a 94th minute winning goal that has now literally been etched in stone in Manchester City lore.
Because of the order of the goals, Aguero is forever part of one of the iconic moments of 21st century European football. Dzeko, meanwhile, is just one of several very good players who were involved in winning titles for Manchester City in the past 10 years.
Which is too bad, because Edin Dzeko deserves to be talked about in the rarefied air of the absolute greats of the game this century.
By the time he left City in 2016, he had already compiled a remarkable career, leading Wolfsburg to the Bundesliga title in 2009, and scoring 50 goals while winning every top domestic trophy in English soccer with Manchester City.
He also helped his home nation qualify for its first ever World Cup, competing alongside the first generation of Bosnians able to represent an independent nation, including former St. Louis Billiken Vedad Ibišević.1Just shouting out Ibisevic because his life story of fleeing Europe, growing up in America, and then returning to Europe as a star soccer player is both incredible and will be echoed later on in this blog.
Dzeko had done all that by 2016, and then he played for another decade. He is kind of like if a telephone pole was made of solid titanium and had a good first touch, and a result, his game has not declined significantly as he aged. Dzeko’s second act in Italy was just as productive as his time in England and France. He can still control the ball under pressure, and he can still seal off a defender to get to a corner kick first.
And now he stuck around for long to lead Bosnia to a second World Cup, this time as an elder statesman and living legend helping a new generation of stars.
The 21st century Bosnian experience has largely been defined by leaving Bosnia, to the extent that in 2013 the band Dubioza kolektiv had an English language hit with a satirical ska song2I know. But it’s actually pretty good largely about how the biggest aspiration of most people in the country was to move to the United States.
It’s a song about the tension between wanting a better life and wanting to live somewhere that feels like home. Recently, because the World Cup is in the United States, it has been repurposed by supporters to be a song about how sick it is that Bosnia is coming to the World Cup.
But echoing the song’s message about returning home, Dzeko will be joined at the World Cup by a generation of Bosnians who grew up abroad but chose to represent the nation of their parents.
The penalty kick that sent Bosnia to the World Cup was scored by Esmir Bajraktarević, whose parents fled Srebrenica and raised their son in Milwaukee. Alongside Esmir3He went by Esmir in the American media before he went over to PSV, so it’s not chickening out to go with the first name, I swear! are German-born players like Ermedin Demirović, a Stuttgart striker who is verging on wily old veteran status himself, and teenage Red Bull Salzburg star Kerim Alajbegović.
Dzeko is an undisputed singular icon within Bosnia, and qualifying for a second World Cup will help solidify his global legacy.
But if a potentially ska-inflected message of the importance of a homeland helps Bosnia’s diaspora stars to reach the second round, Dzeko might finally get the recognition he deserves, 14 years after his first historic moment became a footnote.
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