Vladimir Petkovic, the leader of multicultural Switzerland who speaks eight languages

Vladimir Petkovic (Sarajevo, 1963) listened to the bombs in the background when he spoke to his parents on the phone.

In 1987 he had gone to Switzerland to seek his fortune in the minor leagues and had not been able to get them out before the war began to disintegrate the Balkans.

Today he directs a selection in which the children of that conflict are united.

Those who fled as children (

) and those who were born on Swiss soil (Granit Xhaka, Haris Seferovic).

Petkovic, who was born in the melting pot of Sarajevo, who

and declares himself both Swiss and Bosnian Croat, is the reflection of this multicultural Switzerland that, only in this call, unites under the same flag players with roots of up to 16 different nationalities.

Kosovo (Shaqiri), Albania (Xhaka), Croatia (Gavranovic), Macedonia (Mehmedi), Spain (Benito, Rodríguez), Cameroon (Embolo) ...

Petkovic remembers traveling home in 1991, the summer before hell.

"There was nothing to predict it. Only on the return trip to Switzerland did I see

. The following year, the war reached Sarajevo," he said in an interview.

"There came a time when they cut off the phone calls and for six months we could only contact them through the radio."

It took him a while to get them to take them with him to Switzerland.

Not many of those who lived with the devil himself could imagine it.

Petkovic

, a big one in the city.

Just the year he left the team for the first time, the club hired a psychologist to help the dressing room.

"He told us that we should be united, have team spirit, that victory was useless if it were not together ...", recalled Predrag Pasic, a distinguished player of that team.

"We spent the afternoons with him, we drank together. He was a nice guy," said his partner Faruk Hadzibegic.

"I hate him. I would never have imagined what he would do next."

That psychologist was Radovan Karadzic, one of those most responsible for the Srebrenica genocide.

That year they broke the dominance of Partizan and Red Star to win the League.

Petkovic would return to FK Sarajevo for one more season before ending his contract and packing his bags for Switzerland.

There he bounced through the minor leagues (he changed teams eight times in 12 years) until he became a

.

And it would be with that team, a decade later, that he would rise to fame: the same season in which he promoted the team to the first division, he finished runner-up in the Cup. That year, by the way, was the last of the five he worked for. full time for Caritas.

It was his passport to the elite, taking him first to

, with two brief and bizarre stops in Turkey and Sion.

With the Roman team, he was proclaimed champion of the Italian Cup in his first season and the harmony with the president, Claudio Lotito, seemed complete until, shortly after starting the next course, Switzerland announced that he would be the replacement of Ottmar Hitzfeld after the Brazil World Cup.

The dismissal was sudden.

His record could not be more than that of the German giant when he came to office (two Champions League, seven Bundesligas ...) but with his pragmatic football Switzerland remains a very uncomfortable and effective rival: in the Euro 2016 they fell in eighths by the minimum against Sweden and in the 2018 World Cup against Poland in the penalty shootout.

, he fights to stay in the first division of the Nations League.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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