Edin Džeko has written a letter, addressed not to journalists, not to fans, not to the football world, but to the children of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was published yesterday on The Players’ Tribune in both English and Bosnian, and it began like this:
“I was six years old when it began. I remember when the first sirens went off, and my mother grabbed me and we hid behind the shoe cabinet. That was day one. It went on for four years.”
No other active player at the 2026 World Cup will have written anything like it. No other player at this tournament has earned the right to write anything like it.
Edin Džeko is forty years old. He is one of only three outfield players at the tournament aged forty or more, alongside Cristiano Ronaldo and Luka Modrić. He carries a shoulder injury sustained in March, strapped tight through Bosnia’s qualifying playoff final, and he will carry it onto the pitch in Toronto if his body allows.
He holds 148 caps and 73 goals for Bosnia — both national records — entering his second World Cup, twelve years after his first. He will almost certainly never play in another.
None of that — the records, the longevity, the late-career renaissance with Schalke — is the measure of the man. The measure of the man is that letter. And to understand why, you have to go back to a hillside in Sarajevo, in 1992, when the sirens first started.
The Diamond and the Rubble
For most of Džeko’s formative years, Sarajevo was under siege. The Bosnian War lasted from April 1992 to February 1996, and left a city and a people permanently changed. His family home was destroyed. They moved into a small apartment shared with many relatives — survival, not football, was the first priority. There were fifteen of them, cousins, aunts, uncles, all sleeping on the floor in maybe forty square metres. They used to play Monopoly.
Džeko spent his childhood kicking a ball of rolled-up duct tape around war-torn surroundings. His mother, Belma, was sceptical of the idea of her son being on the streets, but conceded that football was the only way for him to disconnect from the tragedy around him. The nickname that would follow him across Europe — Dijamant, the Diamond — was forged not on a coaching pitch but on a patch of barely unharmed grass in the ruins of a besieged capital.
Then came the day that Belma refused to let him go out. While he prepared to join his friends for a game in a nearby square, his mother refused to let him leave after sensing something was wrong. Moments later, a grenade struck the exact location where his friends had gathered. Several were killed and others seriously injured. That decision saved Džeko’s life.
He has carried that knowledge for forty years. “Our lives were dominated by the conflict as everyone knew someone in the military and this meant we were all touched by the death of friends and family,” he said once, in an interview he visibly did not want to give. “It was a frightening experience to be in Sarajevo when the city was under siege every day, but this was the life I was given and to be honest, I don’t enjoy talking about it so much now.”
He does not enjoy talking about it. He talks about it anyway. Because he understands, more acutely than almost any footballer alive, that sport is not separate from history — that it grows from it, is shaped by it, and sometimes carries it forward when everything else has been destroyed.
The Long Road Out
Džeko began his career at FK Željezničar in Sarajevo, playing as a midfielder between 2003 and 2005, but with little success in that position. He was regarded as too tall, with poor technical abilities.
Czech coach Jiří Plíšek saw something different — raw material, unpolished but worth pursuing — and when he returned home, he recommended Teplice sign the young Bosnian. It was an unlikely path: a war survivor from Sarajevo, heading to second-division Czech football, to become one of the finest strikers in Europe.
From Teplice to Wolfsburg, where he won the Bundesliga title in 2010. From Wolfsburg to Manchester City, he signed for a then-club record fee of €32 million, where he won two Premier League titles and an FA Cup. From City to Roma, where he became a legend across five seasons, scoring 119 goals and winning the love of the Curva Sud.
From Roma to Inter Milan, where he won back-to-back Serie A titles. Then Fenerbahçe, then Fiorentina, and finally — in January 2026, at thirty-nine — back to Germany, to Schalke in the second division. He contributed goals to the club’s return to the Bundesliga and arrived at the World Cup having won a promotion title, still finding the net, still refusing to stop.
“Sometimes everything comes to an end, maybe mine is coming too,” he said this week. But the qualifier sits there, doing its work. Maybe. Not yet.
What Bosnia Means
There is a question that haunts any account of Džeko’s career: what might he have achieved with a different passport?
He is Bosnia’s greatest ever footballer by almost any measure — goals, caps, influence, irreplaceability. But Bosnia, a nation of under four million people still navigating the long aftermath of a war that ended fewer than thirty years ago, could not give him what a different birthplace might have.
While he was at Teplice, they offered him Czech citizenship and the opportunity to represent a stronger national team. He refused. He has never wavered on this. Bosnia first, last, always.
That refusal has defined the shape of his career. He has spent it being the best player on a team that, structurally, could not win the tournaments he deserved to win. His debut at the 2014 World Cup ended in a group-stage exit, with defeats against Argentina and Nigeria and a single win against Iran.
In Brazil, Bosnia’s first ever World Cup match was against Argentina at the Maracanã — against Messi at peak Messi, in the most famous stadium on earth, in the country’s first appearance at the tournament. They lost 2-1. It was, nonetheless, a moment of almost unbearable pride for every Bosnian who watched it.
Twelve years later, Džeko played a pivotal role in Bosnia qualifying for this tournament, scoring a decisive goal against Wales in the playoffs before Bosnia eliminated Italy in a penalty shootout in Zenica in March. His right arm was strapped tight to protect a damaged shoulder.
He raised his left hand to film his teammates’ celebrations on his phone, singing in a bar-room party in white t-shirts bearing the 2026 World Cup logo. The smoke rose above Sarajevo the next morning as fans lit flares to welcome the team home.
That image — the strapped shoulder, the left hand holding the phone, the smoke over the city where he once hid behind a shoe cabinet — contains everything you need to know about Edin Džeko.
One Last Dance
Bosnia face Canada, Qatar and Switzerland in Group B. They are not favourites to advance. Their coach, Sergej Barbarez, was not even certain Džeko would start, given the shoulder injury he has carried since March. But Barbarez offered the clearest possible assessment of what his captain means to this team: “When he’s there, no matter what state he’s in, he’s worth a mint. Sometimes he can make a huge difference with just a few words. The lads listen to him. That’s important.”
In the letter he wrote to Bosnia’s children, Džeko described what it felt like to return to the World Cup at forty, knowing what the country had been through to get there: “Whether you live in Sarajevo, or Rome, or St. Louis… Whether you are Muslim or Jewish or Catholic or Orthodox… Never forget where you came from. You are Bosnian. The world is at your feet.”
The boy who survived the siege of Sarajevo. The midfielder was deemed too tall and too clumsy. The striker who refused Czech citizenship because he was Bosnian and would always be Bosnian. The forty-year-old with a strapped shoulder leading his country into their second World Cup, in the country that for years did not exist and now sends its captain to play football on a global stage built in the ruins of an empire.
“I did not think I would be playing at 40,” he said simply. But here he is. Not just playing. Still the one they look to. Still the Diamond.
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