Xherdan Shaqiri takes on Argentina for Switzerland (and Kosovo)

Xherdan Shaqiri was happy playing with his friends in the youth team of SV Augst. He was 10 years old and did not want change. His father, however, had realised that his son was simply too good to continue for the local team and would benefit from joining FC Basel. It would only have been a 12-minute drive from Augst but Shaqiri’s parents did not have a car so it turned into a 30-minute bus journey. Every day his father came with him. On some days there were tears, on others not.

“It wasn’t an easy start [to my career] when I moved from SV Augst to FC Basel as there was a long way to go to training,” Shaqiri once told Schweiz am Sonntag. “In the beginning I didn’t want to go to Basel at all because I had my friends in Augst and was very happy there. Sometimes I just had to cry. But my dad motivated me and today I am very thankful that I joined FC Basel.”

Those bus journeys must seem a long time ago now, but then so must last week. After Switzerland’s demoralising 5-2 defeat against France in their second group game at the World Cup the 22-year-old Bayern Munich winger was accused of going missing – and he was not happy about it. “This is not about me,” he said. “It is about a team. Always. I feel very comfortable in this team. What annoys me is that I get a lot more criticism when it doesn’t go well. I am exactly the same as all the others. Look, we were completely overrun by the French, we had nothing to put up against them. You can’t always bring to the pitch what you are normally capable of doing.”

Three days later Shaqiri scored a hat-trick against Honduras and the tune back home suddenly changed. He went from being the Bayern Munich player who played better for his club than for his country to once again being the Hoffnungsträger (the bearer of hope) before Tuesday’s last-16 game against Argentina.

“We have our own Lionel Messi,” wrote Blick’s sports editor, Felix Bingesser, and the Messi comparisons have continued in the buildup to the game, perhaps naturally as Shaqiri has been known as the “Alpine Messi” for quite some time now (his rather more politically incorrect nickname is, by the way, “the Magic Dwarf”).

There are similarities between the “two Messis” but they are few and, as we all know, comparing any player to the only Lionel Messi there is, is unfair. They both may be 169 centimetres tall but the similarities probably end there. Shaqiri is stocky and powerful with thighs and calves like a cyclist. Shaqiri is also not even a regular starter at his club (although that can be explained by the fact that he competes with Franck Ribéry, Arjen Robben, Toni Kroos, Mario Götze and Thomas Müller for a place in Bayern’s attack).

What Shaqiri does – and Messi doesn’t – is carry the hopes of three nations on his shoulders: Switzerland, Albania and Kosovo. Shaqiri has worn boots embroidered with the flags of all three countries and when asked about his origins he simply says: “I’m a Kosovar Albanian.”

He regularly posts messages on Facebook in German and Albanian and when Bayern won the Champions League he celebrated with a flag split in two, bearing the colours of Switzerland and Kosovo.

In Serbia, who do not recognise Kosovo, there was outrage and the Serbian FA president Tomislav Karadzic said: “I do not know how they let him bring it in, but he certainly had no right to do so and that, as any political promotion is in conflict with the Uefa statutes. Kosovo is not recognised by the United Nations, Fifa and Uefa, so we see this as a failure of the organisers.”

Kosovo and Serbia reached a landmark agreement to normalise their relations in April 2013 but there is still a lot of tension. It has not always been easy for Shaqiri – and his fellow Kosovar Albanian team-mates Granit Xhaka and Valon Behrami – to stand firm in their double loyalty to Kosovo and Switzerland. For more than a decade, the People’s Party in Switzerland has run campaigns against immigration and targeted Kosovar Albanians in particular. In February, Swiss voters narrowly backed a referendum proposal to bring back strict quotas for immigration from European Union countries.

Despite all this Shaqiri has stood firm in his support for Kosovo and in 2012 he signed a petition asking Uefa to recognise its national team. Two years later, in January 2014, Fifa announced that Kosovo would be able to play friendly matches against Fifa member-states at club and international level. It was a huge step forward for the state, six years after it declared independence from Serbia and applied for Fifa membership.

On 5 March Kosovo, which has a 90% Albanian population, played their first Fifa-recognised friendly, a 0-0 draw against Haiti in Mitrovica. Kosovo’s president, Atifete Jahjaga, and the prime minister, Hashim Thaci, were both in attendance. Kosovo have played another two friendlies since – against Turkey and Senegal – and while it will be a long, long time before they will be able to play in a World Cup, they already have three players flying the flag for them in Brazil.

If Shaqiri and co overcome Argentina and reach the last eight of the World Cup there will be celebrations in Kosovo and Switzerland and, who knows, some People’s Party supporters may even join in.