“This game is going to be like watching 11 U.S. Jet Skis against a large Bosnian battleship, really a Balkans collective,” says Bennett, whose book We Are the World (Cup) was released earlier this year.
A pair of Bosnian players to keep an eye on are Edin Dzeko and Esmir Bajraktarevic. Dzeko, 40, is the all-time leading goal-scorer for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and one of Europe’s most feared strikers, having suited up for the likes of Manchester City and Inter Milan. “He’s one of the game’s great eternal snipers,” says Bennett.
Bajraktarevic, nicknamed “Milwaukee Messi,” grew up in Appleton, Wisc., and played for a Milwaukee-based club team starting when he was 13: he’s the son of Bosnian refugees from Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed in July 1995 in what the International Court of Justice concluded was a genocide. Bajraktarevic made his Major League Soccer debut for the New England Revolution in 2022; in 2024, at just 18 and after playing for U.S. national youth teams, he got a call-up to the senior national squad. Bajraktarevic played in one game, a friendly against Slovenia, before switching to the Bosian team that summer.
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