The Pirate and the Swan: a salute to two of La Liga’s less-celebrated forwards | Sid Lowe

This is the story of the Pirate and the Swan. When Vedat Muriqi was little, which he never really was, he couldn’t always find boots to play in. An adult and a giant before his time, working and shaving at 14, a striker starting out for KF Liria in Prizren, Kosovo, he was 6ft 4in, his feet were size 15, and back home back then you couldn’t get anything that big. Fortunately, one day an aunt in Finland came across a pair of European 48.5s and, pleased as could be, sent them his way. As he opened the box, Vedat realised they were made for rugby but he didn’t have the heart to tell her and, anyway, at least they fit.

They also fit. The man whose former coach had described him as “a strange, ugly beast” you would “cross the street to avoid” and who couldn’t help but agree, admitting: “If I saw me I’d cross over too,” wasn’t much good, or so he said. For a time they called him the Cannibal – a name he identified with, albeit “one that doesn’t eat children” – and soon they called him the Pirate, which he liked more, placing a patch over his left eye when he scored, but a player? That was something else. Someone else too: “I look at Sergi Darder and Dani Rodríguez: if they’re footballers … what am I?” he asked. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t play football; I play a different sport.”

But Muriqi was wrong. He said he goes crashing into people all the time because that’s all he knows how to do. When Barcelona previewed Mallorca’s recent visit by saying it was Robert Lewandowski versus Muriqi, he replied: “There are few strikers that compete with Lewy … and I’m not one of them. Thanks, though.” And he responded to suggestions that he was a Real Mallorca legend by insisting: “I don’t think so: I’m not at Pierre Webó’s or Samuel Eto’o’s level.” Yet that wasn’t entirely true either. There’s a reason Liria put a skull on their shirt and the pirate long since became an idol on the island, a cult hero and just a hero, full stop, that celebration seen more often than anyone could imagine.

Last Saturday, for a start. On the weekend that felt a little like an afterthought, wedged between the Copa del Rey and the Champions League, four of the 10 games changing days because Fans? Forget ’em, Muriqi scored twice against Osasuna. And if the first was, he insisted, “lucky”, a mistake from the goalkeeper Sergio Herrera leaving him free to run the ball into an empty net, the second was superb, belying his size and his own beliefs, feet like boats taking him sailing past two defenders before he guided a gorgeous shot into the net. It took him to 18 league goals – seven ahead of Lewandowski. Better still, he had done it with 11 games left and in the first under the new coach, Martín Demichelis, hauling Mallorca out of the relegation zone. That, at least, is what they thought. There was just one problem: while there was a Pirate on the pitch, the Swan was there too and Osasuna came from 2-0 down to grab a 2-2 draw.

Last week Demichelis had sat in the Son Moix stands, his daughter leaning on his arm looking bored as the team he was about to take over lost 1-0 to Real Sociedad. Mallorca had taken the painful decision to sack Jagoba Arrasate, the squad turning up to the coach’s farewell and the club captain saying his departure had left a “void”, and that defeat, under the interim manager, Gustavo Siviero, was their fourth in a row – a seventh in nine matches. Now on the touchline at El Sadar, Demichelis had to change things, so he did. At half-time Mallorca, who had previously averaged 43% possession, were up at 66%. “To play, you have to enjoy it: a lot of ‘feet’, a lot of passes, a lot of possession,” Demichelis said, while the Diario de Mallorca incredulously reported: “There were even some triangles.” There had also been a goal, from the one player Demichelis would never change. Muriqi scored that, then added his second just after the hour, and, with little more than a minute to go, Mallorca were 2-0 up, momentarily going above Elche and into safety.

That was when it happened like the last time, only worse. In late November, two goals from Muriqi had proven insufficient – and a portrait of their season – when a 2-0 lead was lost, Osasuna scoring in the 82nd and 93rd minutes. Now Osasuna did it again: the first, on 88.59 was scored by Kike Barja, the second on 93.41 by Ante Budimir. The goal hurt Mallorca. Budimir said it hurt him too. His former club were the only first division side he had not scored against, and the way he talked about it, that sounded almost deliberate. “I knew that, I’m on top of the stats,” he said. “Mallorca left a mark on me personally and professionally and it’s difficult to play against them. Antonio Raíllo and Martin Valjent are my friends and I don’t like scoring against them.”

There was something in how Budimir took it – in the movement, the control, the shift of the shoulders, the assuredness of the shot – that was similar to Muriqi’s second goal, and that fit too, even when it didn’t fit at all. This is not the way either of them normally score. Budimir got the nickname the Swan because he was like Marco van Basten but when he explains that, he can’t help laughing, a humility, almost an embarrassment that echoes Muriqi’s: yeah, right. If their story is about talent – and, whatever they say, it is – it is more about temperament, application and attitude, football qualities that feel as if they belong to another time. There was something appropriate about them sharing the stage here: as much as a match with an extraordinary ending, this became a celebration of La Liga’s other forwards, men with much that is shared, right from the start.

“The war is something that Balkans don’t talk about but it marks everyone,” Budimir says. Both his and Muriqi’s family were displaced – respectively from Bosnia to Croatia, from Kosovo to Albania – and their personalities were moulded by it. They are different – Budimir is quieter, Muriqi more of a character – but they have common traits and experiences, similar stories and similar styles. It hasn’t been easy, maturity forced upon them young. When Muriqi became the first Mallorca player to score a hat-trick in almost two decades recently, he dedicated it to his late father, who died of a heart attack just after the war and for whom Muriqi was determined to make it. There is a relentlessness about them: no frills, just a willingness to overcome limitations and doubts, of which there were many.

In Germany, Budimir didn’t score a first-team league goal. At Sampdoria, the same. In two seasons and 38 league games at Lazio, Muriqi got one. But Mallorca was the making of them, Budimir heading to the Balearics before moving to Osasuna, Muriqi arriving soon after and later calling that his “survival”. The best of them came in their 30s: Budimir is Osasuna’s all-time top scorer in primera; Muriqi, who had three or four big offers in the summer but says “I chose life over money”, is two goals from becoming Mallorca’s and overtaking Eto’o. They even both cost €8m once loans were made permanent.

Herrera calls Budimir a bit special and when Sergio Herrera says that, it means something. “After I retire I’ll still talk about Budimir: he’s an example to us all,” Rubén García, another teammate, says. “You can throw anything Muriqi’s way and he turns it into a goal,” Mallorca’s Omar Mascarell insists, and Osasuna’s players see their Budimir in those words too. Old-school, unfashionable No 9s, antiheroes who have become even bigger heroes for it, the kind of people as well as players supporters wish to embrace, no one in La Liga has scored more headers than either of them; only one player in the whole of Spain has won more headers. “Budimir is very serious, very professional, and deserves everything he’s achieved: if he played for Madrid or Barcelona, he would have scored 40,” Croatia’s manager, Zlatko Dalic, says.

Instead, Budimir has scored 13, and those “are worth more” Dalic says. Only Lamine Yamal and Kylian Mbappé are ahead of him in terms of league goals. Well, Lamine Yamal, Kylian Mbappe and Muriqi. Thirteen teams have created more chances than Osasuna, only three have created fewer than Mallorca, and yet there they are, untouched by mere mortals, men their more modest clubs rely on because they can. Muriqi has scored 58% of Mallorca’s goals, Budimir 40% of Osasuna’s, making them first and fourth in Europe and No 1 in Palma and Pamplona, where they found a place to be loved, and all it took was everything. “People from the Balkans know the path to success is a long one,” Budimir says but the pirate and the swan had boots and would travel.