On the day of Iván Balliu’s (Caldas de Malavella, 32 years old) debut as an absolute international, “Que viva España” played on a loop during the warm-up at the Rico Pérez stadium in Alicante. The Rayo Vallecano full-back, then in French club Metz, began to worry: “The song sticks to you, and it kept getting in there…” he remembers. “And I thought, damn, don’t let it hit you, let’s see if they record you singing…” That October 6, 2017, Balliu was about to wear the Albania shirt for the first time against Spain. “I thought: ‘But I have more friends on the rival team than on mine…’. “There were Bartra, Piqué, Busquets… Isco too, who was always with him in the Spanish youth ranks.”
Balliu is a product of La Masia, which he arrived at when he was 12, where he rose through the ranks playing as a center until he became captain of the youth team of the triplet in which Sergi Roberto was also involved, and from which he left nine years later, after playing in the subsidiary, heading to the Portuguese Arouca, already as a winger. On his second stop, at Metz, in the 2016/17 season, he received a call that resolved something mysterious that was happening to him on social networks: “I always received messages in Albanian on Twitter and I thought, they must be confused. I looked at them with the automatic translator and they encouraged me, they showed me Albanian flags…”, he remembers.
“One day they called me on the phone from the federation there and told me: ‘Your last name is Albanian.’ They ask me if he had an Albanian family, and I didn’t know. It is true that looking at the applications they say where your last name comes from, in Spain there are 60 Ballius, and there there are like 4,000. So it is clear that our family comes from there,” he says. “Afterwards, we have a meeting with the president of the federation in Paris and they explain everything to me.” Albania has a department to track down elite footballers descended from the hundreds of thousands of emigrants since World War II. Of the 26 in the Euro, only seven were born in the country. “And I tell them: ‘But I won’t have any problems with this, right?’ ‘No, no, calm down.’ With my father, we looked for the paperwork, the federation got the paperwork from my great-grandfather’s town (the one who emigrated), and we managed to get the passport done.”
By then, Balliu had lost track of the Spanish team. “I saw it as a great opportunity. With Spain, impossible. And they had just played in the first Euro Cup in 2016…” He landed in Tirana when football’s growth plan was beginning to take off. “Before we went to a hotel with its typical natural grass field. “Now we have an ultra-modern sports city and they have built a spectacular national stadium.” With footballers caught in so many places, he had no problem with the language: there were many Swiss and he spoke French. Also many who played in Serie A. And the coach, Panucci, was fluent in Spanish. “I have learned the anthem, because I sing it in every game. And I’m trying to learn the language, I’m looking at words. But it’s difficult; Little Albanian is spoken at the rallies.”
If Luis de la Fuente repeats the plan of the first two games, Balliu would have to defend Nico Williams, the great sensation of the tournament. “Let’s hope he rests…” the footballer joked a few days ago, meticulous with the previous ones. “I really like preparing games because of his physical data. I have mine and I say: if I do, at high intensity, 1,000 meters and this extreme does 600, I say, well in the first part, although I know that they are not going to give it to me, I am going to do 15 sprints and I will tire him out. . Or I say, I can’t let this one run, I have to hit him…” Although with the Athletic winger it is not so simple: “In addition to high intensity, this one has legs. He eats up the kilometers and is very fast. He is not a player who simply pokes you into space, but he also receives you at the foot and comes for you.”
In addition to numbers, Balliu trusts the Albanian fans. Many live in Germany: “it’s going to be brutal. Spain has nothing to do,” he jokes. “The last qualifying match at home was sold out. There was a dealer who gave you one if you bought a Smart. And there were people who bought the car to be able to come.”
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